Topic: How many Bitcoins are lost forever? - page 34. (Read 43070 times)

i think he did mined so many coins, not only for stress purpose but for reducing the overall supply limit, and thus rising the possible demand for it, because scarcity will be more incisive

if he indeed sold those coins, he sold them at the 1200 peak, seeing how he was a firmly believer, still there is chance that he lost all those 1M coins, which would be a good thing, not for him maybe...

Does anyone have the nakamoto suspected wallet address ?, but you raise a good point  but facts showed bitcoin can hold specially after getting goxed, many he doesnt need to dump into the market because he could just sell them to a private broker.

Well, we can't really estimate without getting all the required information. An address staying dormant for a long time may not necessarily means that the owner could have lost the private key, nevertheless that person could have just set the cons aside or have it transferred to an offline paper wallet without trying to access it.

In the current system they create money which will never be destroyed or get lost, with cryptocurrency they loose money easyer then creating it  

Which is better?

Well we can't be sure as many said.
It is VERY important to take into account the founder of bitcoin, satoshi nakamoto.
Is widely speculated known that he owns more than one million bitcoin.
Do you consider them lost? What if he wakes up someday and dumps all his btc on the maket? 

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


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.

simply someone can't accees his private key anymore for many reasons

maybe because he lost it, because he forgot his password, because his hdd has failed ecc...

that like a joke because no body know it
but i want to calculate with my joke  

Total Output Volume bitcoin    1,142,743.87432222BTC
No. of Transactions   121,259

= 1,142,743.87432222/121,259

= 9.423992234161753BTC

 

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

no have idea, i really don't know
we can find out who the owner of the largest bitcoin?

i think that nobody will know it never, because there can be lot of ppl who use cold storage and never move his coins so i think is imposible to think on an accurate number.

btw if a need to say a number i will bet for just a few of them, i dont think that there is so much BTC lost.

interesting question. would be great if we could know the exact answer to that though.

i personally have lost ~0.01 to a brainwallet address that i have created once but forgot the password to as time has passed.

i also wanted to add this bitcoin address that is eating bitcoins and make them "lost forever".
https://blockchain.info/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE
it has 1.98BTC so far!!

some one stole your coins is very sad to hear, but they aren't lost forever. the hacker has them, or maybe he spent the coins already.

Those 740k gox coins were never lost. Maybe distributed through other exchanges, but definitely not lost.

It's already being attempted right now with "bits" which are worth 100 satoshis. If/when the BTC price is $1 million, each bit would be worth $1 and each satoshi would be worth $0.01. The whole thing would work in the same way most of our national currencies work today since everything would be written with two decimal places.



Yup, here's an article about it.

It really goes to show how careless some early adopters were with their bitcoins back when they were virtually worthless. It wouldn't surprise me if many of the coins which were mined throughout 2009, 2010, and early 2011 also met the same fate. Another guy from Norway bought $25 worth of coins at around the same time, forgot about it, noticed in 2013 that the price exploded in the meantime, and then used his mined coins to buy an apartment. Despite the fact that both guys were extreme early adopters, whether or not they were actually able to take advantage of their unique situation pretty much boiled down to sheer luck:


Link: http://www.cnet.com/news/man-forgets-he-once-bought-25-of-bitcoins-now-worth-848k/

There must be a market for bitcoin treasure hunters?!  It's basically hacking, but authorised by someone who realises that they had 100k Bitcoin on a computer that they threw away, or lost the passwords for!

There was a story during the last boom about someon looking threw a tip to find his old PC hard drive because he has 1000BTC on it!

30% lost currency is crazy if you think about it, so really on 15mill will ever be usable

is a very difficult question to be answered , how do you know if the person who has a wallet with the bitcoin , is still in possession of the private key ? just one random example...SATOSHI NAKAMOTO

I don't think it's possible to know , since some wallets are simply inactive and that dosen't mean that they lost private keys or access to their wallets but I will take my chances and say it's above 2.5 million coin (It could be more if Satoshi Nakamoto lost his 1.2 million coin or whatever the exact number it )

Or just introduce names like cent to dollars and Satoshi to bitcoin. What's the problem with saying 1776 Satoshi? Definitively better than 0.00001776 bitcoin.

I've always thought that looks messy and unworkable.

I think it should look something like this: 0.(~12)1776 btc

With the number in the brackets representing the amount of zeros.