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Topic: How many Bitcoins are lost forever? - page 30. (Read 43090 times)

legendary
Activity: 896
Merit: 1000
Louis Vuitton
July 08, 2015, 03:16:25 PM
If I had to give an estimate I would have to say at least 2,500,000 bitcoins are lost.
legendary
Activity: 2590
Merit: 3015
Welt Am Draht
July 08, 2015, 07:01:46 AM
I have coins that haven't moved for over a year and a half. They look pretty undead from here.

Let's say you did have 10,000 coins mined in 2010/11. You'd be pretty hard pressed to spend them all. You're probably enough of a believer to not want to sell all of them. Chances are they're staying put until you can spend them on something you want or need.
sr. member
Activity: 476
Merit: 251
July 08, 2015, 06:48:46 AM
I estimate that somewhere between 30-40% of all BTCs are out of circulation and will never be accessed again.

Where is your source, or did you just make that up?

Here you go, link to first page post.

Some have estimated it's 30 per cent of all Bitcoins. It coins haven't moved for years it's unlikely anyone still controls them, except for Satoshi's coins. The figure keeps increasing because of things like burned coins, such as the 2130 Bitcoins burned during the Counterparty distribution.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11362827/The-625m-lost-forever-the-phenomenon-of-disappearing-Bitcoins.html

Quote
NVIDIA engineer John Ratcliff calculated in June that “zombie coins”, defined as those which have lay dormant for at least a year and a half, accounted for 30 per cent of all Bitcoins.


legendary
Activity: 2674
Merit: 1083
Legendary Escrow Service - Tip Jar in Profile
July 08, 2015, 05:15:36 AM
I have a lot to lose bitcoin, probably around $ 80, it's all because the scam site by offering many advantages  Embarrassed

Those coins arent lost forever, they only are owned by someone other. Tongue

When you read the thread start you would see that this is about coins that cant be accessed anymore because the private keys are lost.

The amount of coins lost forever because of scams are very high for sure too.
full member
Activity: 196
Merit: 100
July 07, 2015, 01:18:11 PM
I estimate that somewhere between 30-40% of all BTCs are out of circulation and will never be accessed again.

Where is your source, or did you just make that up?
full member
Activity: 121
Merit: 100
July 07, 2015, 10:53:24 AM
I estimate that somewhere between 30-40% of all BTCs are out of circulation and will never be accessed again.
newbie
Activity: 56
Merit: 0
July 07, 2015, 09:09:39 AM
The fact is this Bitcoin ultimately has a finite shelf life. there is no way that people won't for a myriad of reasons lose small amounts of Bitcoin until eventually we are all using a fraction of a Bitcoin and eventually we won't want to divide down anymore.

Death particularly will wipe out a large percentage of coins. I doubt very few people on here have told someone else their coin addresses, and guess what, many won't know their last day on earth was the day they got into their car to go shopping etc.

I agree with most of that.

Coins are lost, and will continue to be lost.

But I'm not sure that people will not just continue to use increments of btc. I think they might?
legendary
Activity: 1106
Merit: 1000
July 07, 2015, 09:04:13 AM
The fact is this Bitcoin ultimately has a finite shelf life. there is no way that people won't for a myriad of reasons lose small amounts of Bitcoin until eventually we are all using a fraction of a Bitcoin and eventually we won't want to divide down anymore.

Death particularly will wipe out a large percentage of coins. I doubt very few people on here have told someone else their coin addresses, and guess what, many won't know their last day on earth was the day they got into their car to go shopping etc.
hero member
Activity: 532
Merit: 500
July 07, 2015, 08:55:01 AM
I think the number of lost or forgotten coins is much higher than current estimates. many coins were minted in 2009 and 2010 and have never been touched
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
★777Coin.com★ Fun BTC Casino!
July 07, 2015, 08:32:21 AM
If you knew how many Bitcoin went missing everyday you could easy work it out. I would imagine if you was to make a graph to display the statistics there would be exponential amounts getting lost, due to the growing number of BTC users.

It's gotta be some kind of inconceivable number.
legendary
Activity: 2674
Merit: 1083
Legendary Escrow Service - Tip Jar in Profile
July 07, 2015, 03:13:28 AM
Well since satoshi is dead.... a heck of a lot of coins are useless..

I bet Satoshi was smart enough to prevent his coins being lost. I believe he holds the coins because he has more ideas as to how the world should change. In order to do that he waits until bitcoin is a world currency and then he has the power to really push things. Tongue

In case he dies im sure that a lot of donations will be received by certain organisations. Though he might spread them wisely in order to not crash the bitcoin price.

Im very sure he is smart enough and willing to not lose his coins.
newbie
Activity: 21
Merit: 0
July 06, 2015, 07:43:25 PM
I bet there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of early Bitcoins that were forgotten but early adopters.  I read a story of some guy buying some years ago and just happened to read a story about Bitcoins.  He couldn't even remember where he had some but found the site and had over $200,000 in Bitcoins.  I bet there are a lot of people like this that forgot they had Bitcoins from the beginning.
legendary
Activity: 2450
Merit: 1002
July 06, 2015, 07:32:14 PM
Well since satoshi is dead.... a heck of a lot of coins are useless..
newbie
Activity: 56
Merit: 0
July 06, 2015, 07:00:08 PM
no have idea, i really don't know
we can find out who the owner of the largest bitcoin?

Largest bitcoin? You mean the address with the most coins? According to BitInfoCharts, this is currently the address with the most coins:

http://blockchain.info/address/39coweGgC8CPZ6hYL1BBEfc1zqbSfHsprW

How can bitcoin be lost? i cant understand this? maybe the fees that are taken from each transaction ?

A private key is like a "key" that unlocks an address and allows anyone to spend the funds contained within that address. There are some addresses out there where no known private key exists. For example:

http://blockchain.info/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

Any coins sent to the above address will be lost forever. Same with this unspendable address:

http://blockchain.info/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

That one was used for Counterparty's proof-of-burn. People sent bitcoins to that address to prove that they were "burned" (i.e. destroyed) so that they could be rewarded with the equivalent amount of XCP coins.

It's also possible for coins in an address to be lost forever by simply deleting the private key that corresponds to the address. Your wallet.dat file contains private keys corresponding to addresses in your wallet. Permanently deleting this file from your computer would make any bitcoins stored in that wallet to become permanently inaccessible. While technically speaking, it may be possible to guess the private key and regain access to these coins, private keys are long and random enough that it would take billions upon billions of years to find a successful match.

As for transaction fees, they aren't lost. They go to the miner that solves the next block. Usually this is a pool and miners who mine in that pool get the fees in addition to the block reward.

Could that 215.000 be the Winkelvos?
hero member
Activity: 560
Merit: 500
July 02, 2015, 06:25:59 PM
no im pretty sure that is something around 5% already that may be lost for a while or stored at some disk that gone
sr. member
Activity: 434
Merit: 250
July 02, 2015, 02:36:09 AM
I know it is a tricky question. What do you think, how many Bitcoins are lost forever and are 'out of the network' by lost private keys?

if i have to answer about the amount of bitcoin that lost i never can give the answer...but i think there will be amount of the 10 to 20 % will be lost of the total of bitcoin supply
legendary
Activity: 1470
Merit: 1002
July 01, 2015, 06:20:52 PM
People that use cold wallet and forgot the key.. these bitcoins are lost forever isnt it?

not rally, there is always a chance of a collision, especially in the future with quantum computer, so you can't really say that they are 100% lost, it isn't impossible to retrieve them in some way in the future

Quantum computers can break also security all over the world so these is always a chance not 100%
hero member
Activity: 490
Merit: 500
Captain
July 01, 2015, 03:57:11 PM
Just want to say that I personally lost 0.001... playing around with BIP32 encryption and f**** up a bit and cannot decrypt, still have the encrypted private key somewhere, thinking about posting it so someone can claim it, if they can brute force it, the password is pretty simple (I belive).
legendary
Activity: 2590
Merit: 3015
Welt Am Draht
July 01, 2015, 02:45:33 PM
well those should happening already buying old disk and searching all info inside it ,always a way to recover the information ,and well im pretty sure the people would go into it but who knows which is the disk with bitcoins,and well maybe there isnt any information on it besides the ammount holded there

As it rolls forwards, the number of people with 'proper' wallets will probably shrink. I've never used one myself. You might have the occasional score with an old disk but it would barely make up for the countless hours of trawling on useless ones.
hero member
Activity: 560
Merit: 500
July 01, 2015, 02:44:04 PM
well those should happening already buying old disk and searching all info inside it ,always a way to recover the information ,and well im pretty sure the people would go into it but who knows which is the disk with bitcoins,and well maybe there isnt any information on it besides the ammount holded there
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