Topic: Is there anyone know how many bitcoins disappear forever? (Read 242 times)

Well, as Bitcoin is constructed to be trustless and decentralized, there's no central entity to keep track of "lost" bitcoins. There are provably destroyed coins, those you send to OP_RETURN outputs, miners not claiming the full allowed block subsidy (yes, that happened in the past, unlikely in the future) or spend scripts that can't provably ever be fulfilled.

Then there are "burn addresses" like 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr (213,098,332,861 Sats locked), 1ChancecoinXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXZELUFD (48,019,569,938 Sats locked) and 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE (1,331,866,970 Sats locked), to name a few, where it is almost certain that no entity has the public key and private key. Coins sent to such addresses are taken out of circulation and fill up the UTXO set. They are to be considered lost because no entity will ever obtain the private key for such addresses.

Then with some effort to search in this forum you could've found topics like this one: Let's add up the KNOWN lost bitcoins

You can't really prove what users have listed there but it adds up to some thousands of likely forever lost bitcoins.


I had some really small amount of Sats from a faucet in 2011 that I stacked in a separate Bitcoin-GUI wallet, maybe a few or tens of mBTC, and I'm not sure what happened with those. I thought, I transfered them to my main wallet back then, but couldn't find the incoming transaction in my oldest wallet(s). So, maybe those are lost, unless I dig up that wallet from somewhere deep hidden in my filestore. I've no high hopes, though.

I do not think that it is possible to pinpoint which wallets have lost private keys unless you specifically know them.

As far as I know, there are thousands of BTCs which are currently lost in circulation or inside some wallets that belong to either deceased persons who have failed to share their private keys; or to some people who completely forgotten about them. Though this may be the case, I do believe that this is what makes the economy of BTC- its limited resource and scarce supply makes it more valuable the more it is being mined.

This is also the reason on why many anticipate the upcoming fork this 2024. With this being said, I do recommend that you always keep your private key to yourself or inside a vault in the event of an accident to your life or to your belongings.

The only bitcoins that we can classify under lost category is that sent to OP_RETURN command otherwise people who have lost keys or passwords to their wallets may at some point recover those and coins will again be in circulation so we can't call them lost.Although they are lost in the current time and out of circulation but in future we may see supply boosted if they get access to it.

There are many articles claiming around 4M coins are lost but we don't have access to any data that make clarifications on this matter so we just assume they are lost at this time.

You should keep the private keys (magic numbers) to your Bitcoins closely guarded. But what if you're chilling and then you're not and all your satoshis vanish in a puff of smoke?

After some pondering, I think I've come up with a few potential solutions to this problem. Have you heard of these so-called "dead man's switches"? If you dont answer to their periodic pings, they'll leak your confidential information. However, you should know that putting it together can take some doing.

You may even utilise a time-locked transaction and go all-out Mission Impossible on them. Your Bitcoins will be sent to a verified address at the specified interval. But you should exercise caution. Too lengthy of a timer and you'll be racing against your own money.

There's no way to restore access to coins that were truly lost, and it's also next to impossible to assess which coins fall under that category. Estimations usually rely on presuming coins that weren't moved for x years are lost. But it's perfectly reasonable that some may simply have no reason to move the coins over the years while technically being able to do that, so those coins aren't actually lost. Then there are people who lost access to their wallets, but there's a small chance that they or someone else will find access to them at some point by stumbling upon a seed phrase or something. Finally, there are coins that were burned intentionally and those accidentally sent to non-existent addresses, in which cases the coins are truly lost, but keeping track of that isn't easy either.

Some of those six million worth of bitcoin could have been lost owing to sudden death of the owners maybe a ghastly car accident or some related accident (not only through a lost of private keys by owner) ,and these unfortunate BTC owners in their wallet never exposed their private keys to a trusted family member who could have been able to have access to their wallet to retrieve those BTC from eternal loss.

What can we make of this in relation to increasing clamour for BTC hodlers to keep their private keys completely secret from anyone  not even to family members (under the idea of keeping it safe) due to trust issues.  Accessing this what are the options to avoid forever loss of our BTC if we don't want to let any family member know about our private keys while we're still alive?

I had to double check the date but there is a thread EXACTLY like this somewhere on bitcointalk where people discuss how many bitcoins they lost forever and they kept a tally. I am too lazy to search but I remember reading it a few times. Maybe someone here knows what I am talking about and can post it.

As for coins lost? I would say around 2 million or so for sure. Maybe up to 4 million in some cases. The satoshi coins are definitely lost and there is over 1 million or so plus another million or two for people who just lost their private keys.

From the information I know, the missing bitcoins to date are quite large.

Source: https://zipmex.com/id/learn/berapa-banyak-bitcoin-yang-hilang-dan-tidak-bisa-diakses/

That way, if the original owner doesn't remember or doesn't find the private key of the bitcoin in his possession, then the bitcoin will surely remain lost forever. Even to be hacked it would be very difficult, even very impossible to do.

So if you have lost your bitcoins, try to remember where your wallet keys were and you wrote them down. Is it written on paper or you save it in the computer. If after doing this and you don't remember your bitcoin wallet key at all, or you don't write down the phrase at all. That means you have to be able to give up the bitcoin that you have.

Therefore, if you want to buy bitcoin and store it in a non-custodial personal wallet. Don't forget to copy the key/phrase, and keep it in a safe place. That way, the key won't be lost and your bitcoins will stay safe.

Access to wallets and bitcoins can be changed hands, recovered by some future advanced recovery services or compromised, we don't know about it now. We only assume very long inactive bitcoins have high chances of belong to people who lost access to those wallets and bitcoins.

We only can use HODL waves for estimations which are only estimations and don't represent exact amount of forever lost bitcoins.

We can use 10 years like you suggested, 8 years, 6 years or 5 years, any period that arbitrarily chosen by each person. Not all bitcoins inactive for like last 10 years are lost bitcoins and those coins can be woken up anytime in future.

Maybe you still haven't figured out what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is a blockchain based decentralized currency which allows you to be your own bank.
Any bitcoin in any wallet will remain there unless it's moved by the actual owner or you give your private keys to someone.

Bitcoin does not disappear, it just stays in the account. You cannot destroy Bitcoin, it can only be transferred from one account to another.
And the amount of "lost" bitcoins, maybe you mean the accounts which no one can access now, cannot be calculated however you can check which accounts are inactive for maybe 10 years?

Not lost but just lose in trading.

Those lost forever can't be retrieved if there's no longer the private keys from the owners of it. @OP how did you lost that 10 bitcoins of yours?

And that's sad as just this one: The Welshman who accidentally threw out 8,000 Bitcoin in 2013 is mounting an $11 million campaign to get it back

As of this moment, there isn't any way to retrieve those 2,550,615 bitcoins (rough estimation), but who knows. We might see a device, or something that has the capabilities to retrieve it though I don't know how, but with how the technology is evolving right now, and on a rapid pace we might have one in the future.

As for me, I guess it's good also that when I first started to invest into Bitcoin, I saw many people using it already, and it's starting to become popular at that time. Those early adopters of Bitcoin who bought very early like you (if it's true), have a tendency to just forgot it back then because you don't know what will it be 3 or 5 or even 10 years from now. Well, 10 Bitcoin is already a huge compare to what it was when you bought it, but I guess it's time to say goodbye to it unless you remember where you stored your private keys.

With this, I remembered the person who threw away on the dumpsite his floppy disk something or a hard drive that contain private keys that hold thousands of Bitcoins.

That was a long time ago. By the time you lost Bitcoin, you should immediately find the key to open the wallet. You can check all the places where you usually put your important things. There is a very low chance to found a lost Bitcoin private key if takes a decade before you decide to find it. Most of the time, the things that are visible in your house are not visible in today.
It's a lesson to us that we should keep our private key in a safe place, if possible in multiple places. If ever you can't find it, the chances of finding them increases and you should change your private key after you found it.

There's no way anyone can get those lost Bitcoins unless the private keys to the wallet that contain the BTC are retrieved if it's not retrieved the BTC is lost forever.
To your question, it's hard to know all the BTC that are lost forever but as of November 2022, it is estimated that 2,550,615 bitcoins.

I am sorry for your loss and you're not the only one who is the early holder of Bitcoin but lost along the way. Although, I have never join the BTC scheme then but years ago I got some SOL through Airdrop but didn't withdraw it from their Airdrop website and that's how I learn the lesson of never any crypto.

I'm sorry for your loss; I'm guessing you tried recovering them already to no avail, which is saddening, but you're certainly not the only one.

This matter has been discussed quite a few times in the past. An exact amount of lost Bitcoins can't be determined, but as others have already mentioned, it's said to be approximately 5 to 6 million coins. Of course, this estimate might be way off, but there's no actual way of knowing. The intriguing part of this is that Bitcoin is actually rarer than we've thought it to be due to its actual circulating supply, which is a lot smaller than the current number of approximately 19.5 million coins.

I think its kind of impossible to really come to terms with the exact number of bitcoins that are lost, this is because, when we visit the bitcoin blockchain explorer, and view addresses holding bitcoins, there is nothing indicating addresses holding bitcoin that their respective owners have lost access to, they appear there like every other address normally.
Chainanalysis and other forensic experts might or do come up with some numbers as possible bitcoin that are lost forever, but the truth is that, we can never be sure, since most of the time, those numbers are called from wallet holding bitcoin that haven't had any activity on it for a very long time, that is not an evidence enough that the owner of such wallet have lost access to it.

Well, there is no such place, lost bitcoins are lost, except the user luckily discovers or recovers his or her private key, that is, the key to the wallet containing the bitcoin, anything outside that, there is no other way to get lost bitcoins back, if there was, then the lost bitcoins will not be referred to as lost - in the first place.

Bitcoin wallet is decentralized and nobody or any other person has the access to your wallet so if you lost your private key then your coins will lost forever and that is why we advise bitcoin users to always have backup of the private key and split it in different places so in case you misplaced the one that is with you, you can still use the backup to retrieve the wallet back. The amount of bitcoin you lost as of that time was not big as of now. But what really happened that you lost such amount of bitcoin. Probably as of that time you were not serious about the coins if not the whole 10 BTC just lost like that? Op your negligence might had caused this. Sorry.

2011 is a long time from now and there is now way you can recover your Bitcoin. Once you lost your private key, just forget about your entire Bitcoin portfolio because you will not be able to recover them. This is one of the reasons why we need to keep our private key safe form external access because anybody that lays his hand on the private key can transfer all the whole Bitcoin in that wallet and it can't be recovered again. There are many investors too that had made this kind of mistake and till now they are still regretting it how they were so unfortunate to have lost access to there private keys.

That’s a lot of bitcoins, so sorry for your loss. I hope that’s not all you had, it will be comforting if you had some bitcoins stored in a different wallet. 2011 was a different time and people were not as cautious of their bitcoin as they are now because of the price value.
There is no way to recover lost bitcoins, I have read articles online about softwares that generate thousands of private keys that may or may not contain some lost bitcoins, there has been no record of success and I don’t think anyone should waste his time on such treasure hunt.

No! Nothing suggests that their report is accurate. Even in the tweet they shared, Timothy Peterson stated: "I estimate that..." This indicates that it's just an estimate, and nothing more.
Even if you read the entire article in the link that Mr. Peterson shared, you will see that there is no concrete evidence of lost coins; rather, they used a specific methodology to estimate the amount of lost coins. There's no way to know if their methodology is even remotely accurate.


Based on what?