Topic: Lost Bitcoin (Read 811 times)

Sorry for your seemingly lack of insight.  You have been registered on the forum for 7 months, and you did not buy any bitcoin.

Just think if you would have put $100 per week into bitcoin since the time of your registration.  You would have had invested right around $3,600 and you would have accumulated 0.1584 BTC (currently valued at right around $10,816), so you would have had been in profits right around 2x.. You would have your original amount plus 2x more. also could be referred to having 3x more than the original amount.  There shouldn't be any complaint with that, and the main thing would be figuring out how to hold your coins so that you wouldn't feel vulnerable to losing them in one way or another.

It is agree that there is a bit of a learning curve, especially for anyone who might want to hold their own coin rather than keeping it with others..  and it will vary for each of us in regards to how much of our value that we might want to keep on an exchange versus transferring to our own custody and also maybe how to make sure that our UTXOs are manageable and reasonable sizes.  Yep.. a learning curve that not everyone ready, willing and able take the responsibilities of holding their own keys, even though holding your own keys can be quite empowering.


Those might be examples of people who had not figured out how to secure their coins and/or keeping their coins with questionable 3rd parties.. Yeah, there may well be some risks in terms of being able to get the profits, such as 3x in only 7 months... and surely at the same time, there is a tendency that the longer that people are in bitcoin, the greater their profits, but they still have to figure out how to balance the risks and to not lose their coins.


So you are more on the conservative side, and I consider myself also to be fairly conservative, but I found out about bitcoin a bit more than 10 years ago, and I also had been investing for 20 years prior to getting into bitcoin.. so there are ways to figure out your position size in order to account for the level of your desires to be conservative in your investment style.


You are not in a position to lecture any of us about what we should do or how we should do it, especially since you have not been doing it yourself.  You are so conservative, scared and maybe you have really good capital preservation practices, but it hardly does any good if you are talking to forum members who likely mostly have bitcoin, and you are lecturing us about what we should and/or should not do in order to exercise good and/or safe security practices in regards to our bitcoin, which you already stated that you don't have any..


No.  There is no way to get back coins if you lose your access, unless you happen to have parts of the private key (or seed) and there might be some ways to figure out the other parts.  So if you have part of the solution, then there could be ways to recover the seed, but if you totally lost everything or you don't have enough pieces, then you will be out of luck.

There could be some folks who might pass down their keys or leave instructions, but the instructions would need to be clear enough in order to figure out how to access the wallets, so there could be ways of figuring it out later with fewer pieces of the puzzle.. for example if someone might have had split up the key, there could be possibilities that if 1/2 is found or 1/3 or 2/3 is found then it could become more likely with the higher number of pieces.


The seed phrase is one of the most common methods of either backing up or saving a private key, but there are other ways that private keys are backed up, and I don't claim to be an expert on all the ways that private keys are backed up, so there are some aspects of bitcoin that change over time, while still being backward compatible, while at the same time some of the security practices are likely difficult and easy at the same time by design.. .. while at the same time, there are likely more and more user-friendliness in bitcoin, but sometimes there can be needs to learn more complicated things if you are changing your security practices, and there may well be safeguards that need to be taken, but some of them are not difficult under certain systems, such as the seed phrase system is not difficult, but it was not part of bitcoin when bitcoin was introduced, it came about later as a proposal in 2013 as a part of BIP39, and went live in 2014. So it is an example of bitcoin becoming more user-friendly with the passage of time.

A clip from this article says that:  >>>>>>BIP39 is part of the many BIPs (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) that aim to improve the Bitcoin protocol. It was proposed in 2013 by Marek Palatinus, Pavol Rusnak, Aaron Voisine and Sean Bowe. It was implemented on Bitcoin in 2014 and has been adopted by many other cryptocurrency projects since then.<<<<<<<

Although I don't currently own bitcoin, I get frightened occasionally when I see threads about people losing their asses. Because I will feel depressed if I lose what I have saved and purchased. And given how I'm even organizing my investment, I would be devastated to lose it. Additionally, some people lose access because they are irresponsible and disregard access codes and other documents pertaining to the wallets. The issue at hand is that, should you misplace your private key, your valuables will be permanently lost. Keeping your bitcoins secure requires keeping them in a wallet. And anytime the price of bitcoin is going up and you have lost yours. It will lead to depression. Aside all this principles just follow instruction.

But will there be any way in the future that if you lose your seed phrase there would be way of getting it back. Maybe for a stronger security that is why they made everything impossible without a seed phrase.

There shouldn't be one. If there was, it would also be possible to replace our own coins with others.

These coins, unless they are provably burnt using OP_RETURN, then they are just locked, until someone manages to unlock them, by brute-forcing private keys, or by solving the ECDLP. Both are highly unlikely, which means that these coins are probably "burnt" forever.

As far as I know, there hasn’t been any widely accepted plan or consensus to update the bitcoin protocol to replace lost bitcoins. I mean, we might think of it as a gift to the community as a whole. though you will truly regret it because the money you would have received was wasted and you ended up losing it. In order to protect your account and ensure that you can easily remember and recover it, it is advisable to put your private keys or your bitcoin password somewhere where you may also store other crucial account passwords. I personally prefer to take notes in my notebook rather than save any sensitive data on my laptop or mobile device since I worry that someone could gain access to my belongings and be able to hack them.

That's good, because more and more bitcoins are lost or no longer accessible for one reason or another, and the most common is the loss of Bitcoin passwords or private keys. And such cases may cause or influence the price of bitcoin to continue increasing until it reaches the maximum market capitalization after the last coin is created.
And to recover lost bitcoins is very challenging and often impossible and will not work and Bitcoins will be lost forever. And no one, even if he is an expert or a central authority, is asked to help restore it, because Bitcoin is decentralized and relies on cryptographic principles for security. So forget it, even though it is painful, it is a reality that must be accepted, especially if you see the already expensive price of Bitcoin, it will definitely be even more painful.

There is no way to recover lost bitcoins that are lost forever, unless the address wallet owner finds their private key and regains access to their wallet. And the possibility of those Bitcoin wallet owners actually getting access to their wallets is very low, so the possibility of those Bitcoins coming to the market is also very low.

Bitcoins that are lost are good for us as Bitcoins are reduced from the supply and will affect the market price as well. There is no protocol to recover lost bitcoins forever, so your expectation may not come true. The amount of bitcoins lost is a very large amount of bitcoins.

This is what I would also say about a solution. We know that bitcoin's smallest unit is Satoshi but if there's a smaller unit than satoshi then it will surely be a good solution if the smallest unit is too expensive. I think it's possible to do that since lightning network have smaller units than satoshi which is millisatoshi which is much smaller than Satoshi as you already know that. I think it will happen on bitcoin main network if satoshi become too expensive and won't even be called as the smallest unit in bitcoin cryptocurrency.

From my perspective, the loss of bitcoins is an inevitable part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. While losing 4-6 million bitcoins may seem significant, it's also a part of the unique dynamics of this asset. The idea of updating the protocol to replace lost bitcoins, while appealing, seems impractical and risky. Protocol changes could undermine trust in the system and threaten its decentralization. Instead, it's better to focus on ensuring the security and responsible storage of one's own bitcoins to minimize the risk of loss.

I am sensing that part of the difficulty comes from an inability to prove a negative, which contributes to the logic that non-ones coins are going to be replaced once they lose access to their private keys and/or are otherwise unable to figure out how to access their coins.

So ownership of BTC revolves around whether you have the private keys, and if you say that you don't have the private keys, there is no way to really verify that; however, we can verify that you have the private keys when you enter them and you access your BTC wallet.

In the end, it seems that the main solution would be making bitcoin more divisible, in the event that one satoshi starts to become too expensive and too impractical as the smallest unit, and so if a decent amount of private keys are lost and continue to get lost (which seems almost inevitable that keys are going to continue to get lost), then whichever coins are left might need to be subdivided further in the event that there are not enough coins to go around or their are not able to be used in the transaction of goods, services and/or other reasons for transacting value.

The statement already tells everything about it, which just means that there was no need to recover those coins at all, it has some kind of benefits for all of the Bitcoin holders and theoretically could increase the market price because it just lowers the overall supply of Bitcoin, you could consider them as burn I guess but technically not burn supply it is just hidden or lose to a wallet that will never be open again because no one knows the password.

I mean there was no way to recover these Bitcoins anyway there was no need to recover this Bitcoin unless you were the owner of it, it might be a huge loss on your part but still it's going to be your fault for not saving that seed phrase or password.

Also, there was no reason for some people to have a claim on that Bitcoin because it wasn't really their Bitcoin, I guess they might be some kind of hacker thinking if it is possible to hack this wallet.

Remember as well that these are just estimates no one really knows how many Bitcoins are lost, if you're going to google it it's around 30% probably they just based it on the Bitcoin that is not been moved for years.

It is not possible to replace lost Bitcoin. Any Bitcoin that is lost is lost for good and gone forever there is no point thinking about a way out. We just need to be careful the way we keep our pass phrase because our pass phrase is our identity and pride. If you misplaced the pass phrase your coin become trapped in the wallet and becomes useless.

It's the point why we will not see Bitcoin community vote in a consensus to increase Bitcoin total supply. They are smart enough to know one of factors to create scarcity then value of Bitcoin is it limited supply.

If the initial limited total supply can be changed, it will be changed more times in future. It will damage one of main factors for value creation of Bitcoin.

Increasing total supply is hope of Bitcoin outsiders who want to join this party but always think it is too expensive to buy and want to have more bitcoins and cheaper price to load up.

For true Bitcoiners, we don't need any increase in Bitcoin total supply, even just 100k or 1M more bitcoins.

That's what makes Bitcoin different, it's completely decentralized, and there can be no changes made in it or its supply or anything, else. As you said, this is what makes Bitcoin so valuable because the supply stays stagnant which is why when the demand increases, it increases the price value of Bitcoin with it.We don't need a consensus or an algorithm that would generate coins equivalent to the coins lost, besides, how would it be determined how many coins are lost and how would the people who have lost their coins get the compensation for it? So I don't think such a thing would work and even if it does, it wouldn't be good for Bitcoin in general because people would start losing trust in its decentralization.

We already have a consensus for that, lost coins are lost forever.

No plans to update it from the core developers and I hope they keep it that way. Those who have lost their bitcoins will most likely want to get it back and sell it right on the market causing massive dumps.

Less coins in circulation means more demand and more price of a satoshi per fiat currency.

I agree. Don't know why people are saying coins that are not moved to another address are lost ? Every now and then someone move a lot of old coins. In the end they all move.

https://decrypt.co/213243/2-billion-dormant-bitcoin-moved-why

And yes, the private keys are proof of ownership.

I don't understand what you mean by reducing the total supply of lost Bitcoin. Lost Bitcoin are lost forever and to reduce it should technically mean recovering the lost Bitcoin and that I don't know how possible it is. Assuming it were to be possible, I don't think Satoshi will play a part or be willing to get involved in it considering that he has gone away for a long time now after creating Bitcoin. There are many other devs that can attempt to recover them should there be a way of doing that. What I do know is that those coins are gone and gone forever, and if anything changes about this, it will really be a huge news that will shake the market accordingly.

People who buy and hold bitcoins but can't exchange their wallets will never get that bitcoin back and no one will ever get it back.  They will remain that way for life.  Satoshi designed Bitcoin in such a way that as long as you have access to the wallet, even if you lose the wallet or transfer bitcoins from your wallet to a wrong address, the bitcoins cannot be retrieved. If once the block is confirmed. so you have to care your bitcoin yourself. otherwise you will lost your bitcoin for lifetime

Lost Bitcoin refers to all those wallets that wallets are currently inactive. However, there are many investors who have Bitcoin holdings in their wallets but they have not yet activated their wallets. But whether it will be possible to reduce the lost Bitcoin total supply through any process, only those who are Bitcoin developers can say for sure. However, for the time being, it is not possible to say with certainty whether all these changes or updates will be possible without Satoshi Nakamoto.

Basically because bitcoins are lost, the price of bitcoins is so high. It will increase in value and lose more in the future, so the more bitcoins are lost, the higher their value will be.

Halving + lost bitcoins forever.

This is making Bitcoin scarcer. You see the importance of holding and why you shouldn't just sell it for nothing.

The last Bitcoin will be mined estimated on 2140 and we're all probably dead by that time. The system that has been made for Bitcoin is really to distribute the wealth to everyone who has believed on it, coming from the early adopters and also to the ones that are riding the trains now.