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.

Well, I often see on social media where the old wallet is active again to transfer BTC to a new wallet or to an exchange. I think we can't know how big the lost coins are, but I'm sure that every year the lost coins continue to exist because the coin owners die and that might be a fact that happens.

However, I think the old wallets that are active again are the owners of Bitcoin miners in the past and they returned when the price was approaching ATH. However, the more coins lost will certainly benefit bitcoin holders.
Scarcity will definitely occur because more and more people in the world are buying bitcoin as their investment asset.

There is no plan, Satoshi himself told that lost BTC is a donation for everyone because the lower the supply, the higher the price.

Yes, we cannot know and cannot control how much bitcoin has been lost. Many wallets have been inactive for many years, which does not mean that the owners have lost them, but more likely that they are still quietly holding out until a more appropriate time.

Additionally, the bitcoin supply is very small compared to the world's population, so even if we had 21 million bitcoins circulating in the market, it wouldn't be enough to meet the demand. So I don't expect as many bitcoins to be lost as many are hoping.

I don’t think there is 4-6 million lost. Many of the coins from 2010 can still be moved. Just today some dormant miner ended up moving 2000BTC from 2010 to a new wallet. They are 13 years old and just moved today. This is proof that these addresses while dormant can still be moved.

Those from 2009 most likely won’t be moved however. Especially since many are satoshis and those other blocks in the early all had the bitcoins already spent.

Just looking at it in two different views right now there is no review or anything they are intend to make in any bitcoin. if you misplaced your wallet or your private key, your bitcoin are gone if you don’t know if you can get it your it gone for ever.
But come to think of it in the other hand where are all those lost bitcoins I can remember a few years back I had a wallet I can’t even remember the password or the back phrase.

Bitcoin has been created in a particular number which was stated in the coinmarketcap maximum supply 21,000,000 and no additional Bitcoin will be creat to add, and any lost of Bitcoin is automatically lost forever and that is the sweetest part of the business and keep reducing as time goes on, while demand keep increasing in the cryptocurrency industries market.

When a bitcoin is lost there is no other option but to forget it.  Because as long as the Bitcoin is in your wallet and as long as you have access to that wallet, you own the Bitcoin. once that bitcoin is gone from your wallet or you lose the key of the wallet you will never get that bitcoin back and if it is not under someone else then the bitcoin is completely lost and no one can use it. And there is no way to bring them back. this is why Satoshi made such a comment

I won't wish for that. It's said that it's estimated that there's a million of lost Bitcoins forever and that's more than enough already. That's a big contribution for this limited supply asset that we've got. Which means that from the entire supply limit of it has around 5% that has lost forever while there's still the supplies that haven't been mined yet and it's only going to stop after more than a century.

This factor that you can actually lose your coins and money for good without a way of getting it back is the same thing that will keep everyone to that is supposedly having Bitcoin a little more extra careful because if Incase you should lose the keys to your wallet, it's a bye bye and even Satoshi himself can't do shit about it and the sense that it's actually a plus for others makes it extra special too so if there anything I will be praying for, I think more folks should actually lose their coins so I can get that extra bonus 😁😁.

So, after all this conversation, my question is, does it really matter how many coins are lost forever?

A simple thing to consider is that there are 21M coins, for ~8B people. The scarcity of Bitcoin is outstanding.

We must think and calculate in satoshis and not in Bitcoins, because the huge majority of people will own satoshis and not whole bitcoins.

But for all this to happen, we must scale Bitcoin. It's out of topic, but I really need to stress its importance. Bitcoin needs scaling.

That number is speculative, you cannot really know for sure how many BTC's are lost and lost forever. Take note that there are coins that have been in a particular address for a very long time and have not moved, but some people think the coins are lost, whereas the owner still has the keys to the funds and just does not want to move it or spend it yet.

There would be no update on the protocol that would implement what you have suggested, lost coins would remain lost, and if you don't want to lose your coins, work on your opsec and security.

Oh wow! Satoshi already had speculated on this. That says just how far into the time the pioneer was and for a fact, it’s one way to create scarcity, increasing the demand on what we have in circulation to make it worth even more.
It wouldn’t be a best idea to have new coins added to the network and even should there be any derivation, it would be a fork and not Bitcoin.

If there will be some changes then it's going to fuck up the whole network and many will lose trust to blockchain itself. And that's why satoshi has made it clear that lost coins are considered donation to the community and you should accept that fact because it is not going to change and the consensus tells us that there won't be any change that will happen although discussions are there and it's being talked about but it doesn't make sense anymore.

I really hope nobody will ever come up with the idea, or proposal, to recover those bitcoins because it would mean going against Satoshi's vision, as Omega already pointed out simply quoting Satoshi's message. If we start doing changes like this who knows what else could happen to bitcoin's protocol, that's the reason I hope everything stays the same.

If you lose a bank note, does your government print it for you, or does it change the whole currency? It won't be possible anyway, so Bitcoin is something similar. Lost means it has gone; there is no way to recover it. Even if you hard fork, lost bitcoin will be the same as lost. Because the address holding Bitcoin will get the same amount. So there is no way to recover lost bitcoin. Don't expect someone to lose Bitcoin, but it does reduce the circulating supply, and that's the reason Satoshi said lost Bitcoin should be considered a donation for the community. 

Any Bitcoin that is lost, is lost forever and counted it as a gift the the rest of the Bitcoin holders, unlike the other way around where there is a possibility to recover with the help of a centralized protocol but in this case, any Bitcoin that is transferred to an inaccessible wallet will become a burn Bitcoin since there be no way for its usability.


Just like Satoshi mentioned in the quote above, so let's stop looking for the possibility of having them again, all of us have lost some fraction of Bitcoin and to that extent, we consider them as donations.

Actually there is no mechanism through which the lost number of bitcoin can replace and such lost portion of bitcoin cannot be ever a part of bitcoin again. Some of the individuals have lost their key information due to which they have lost their bitcoin and there are also some individuals who have not share their private keys with their families and after their death nobody is able to recover those bitcoin.

If there was a mechanism to recover lost bitcoin then I think the number of bitcoin will remains constant and there will be no change in its number but you will have heard that the number of bitcoin is decreased currently as compared to the number of bitcoin in the past.

Could have been used for trading.

BTW. "Eloncoin". I have "Elon". Matic. MATIC+ELON LP.

I get it for free now. Same goes for BTC. Contracted. So you better find a new cow that wants to be milked. Cheers.

OP the only thing that can be done about those lost Bitcoin is them being found (if possible). Nothing more.


Reading the main topic that led to this response from Satoshi, I see the OP talking about the coins of users who were trying bitcoin out but never use it again. That’s crazy to think of. Imagine how many Bitcoin they may have lost just to test Bitcoin. Now 1 Bitcoin is worth $51,000! Who would have known?!

OP, just forget about every lost Bitcoin. There is no way Satoshi would want to reverse the Bitcoin blockchain protocol to replace the lost Bitcoin. If  that is done, it will cause the price of Bitcoin to drop because what makes  price of Bitcoin to increase is its nature of scarcity. Although the circulating supply of Bitcoin is still plentiful but yet it can not satisfy the deman of everyone. Satoshi himself made a statement about lost Bitcoin and his statement suggests that he doesn't have any intention to call back any lost Bitcoin.

Raise your standards, don't just read or watch from a single source, read at least 2-3 sources when it comes to information and specific question. You can also ask questions on community forums like here and reddit too, just be aware of scammers, just don't communicate via pm especially when there's no need to.

no, bitcoins that are lost intentionally or not will be lost forever in circulation, there is no consensus whatsoever that can return them, besides, if they are returned, who receives them? unless miraculously he finds his pk again and opens the wallet. I can't imagine what it would be like if the 4-6 million lost bitcoins returned to circulation, there is no exchange that can accommodate that much bitcoin. I don't think that's good for the sustainability of bitcoin, so it would be good if there were 4-6 million bitcoins being burned independently lol

Bitcoin is no longer completely decentralized if the lost coins is replaced with the new coins because that makes the address lose it's coins, anything that related to revert, changing, replacing, banning or restricting, will be controversial because not everyone can accept that.

What if there's a person send their coins to burn address on purpose? even though it sounds stupid, but everyone has a choice by doing anything they want.

YT can be a source of good entertainment and useful information, but also the vast majority of information regarding cryptocurrencies (especially Bitcoin) is wrong and confusing. I'm not saying that there is no good content, but by the time you find something good, they fill your head with all kinds of nonsense that is hard to get out of your head.


Can you clarify what exactly you mean when you talk about 21 million BTC? It is true that the max supply is 21 million, and that there are currently around 19.6 million BTC in circulation, and that the last BTC will be mined around the year 2140.

As for governments and large companies, I think that they are still late when it comes to Bitcoin, because sometime by the middle or end of 2017, Bitcoin was not really in their focus as an investment. In other words, ordinary people had more than enough time to accumulate as much as they wanted at fairly low prices - while "they" today have to pay $50k+ for 1 BTC.

Again, you don't need to worry about those lost supplies which is not really around 4-6 million. There were a lot of assumptions about how many total bitcoin have lost in the circulation, but i think 4-6 million is too much of an estimate. We've seen several bitcoins that hasn't moved for several years and then it suddenly moved at one point, so those assumptions includes bitcoin that hasn't move for almost 7-10 years considered as lost bitcoin.
Now,  21 million supplies minus those have lost in the circulation may sound just not going to be enough for all people to own a fraction. But, as bitcoin gained value constantly, 1 bitcoin maybe owned and shared for more than 1,000 people eventually.

Bitcoin is different from all other coins because it is lost and its price is very high. It has gained more popularity among all and this Bitcoin will gain more popularity in future.
Because it is a widely known and discussed coin all over the world which is preferred by all investors.

That seems a high number. It's possible that many of these coins are just dormant. But we know that every once in a while there are old coins that suddenly wake up.

But these dormant coins are actually neither lost nor gone. They're still in the blockchain. What's lost is our access to them.

It is designed this way. Why should we change it? You lost your private keys, you lost access to your coins. That's it. And that's why you need to take utmost care of your private keys.

No there aren't because lost coins are not a problem whatsoever. There's plenty of units of account to fill the need for them. Losing millions of coins changes nothing since one coin is actually 100 million "coins".

Plus returning a large amount of coins into circulation would just dump the price for all holders, and holders are the ones who decide the rules, so why would they agree to such change?

That's the unique protocol of Bitcoin, it can be changed.
As of now, it's 19,632,318 total circulating supply in the Coin market cap, so there's no fixed total amount of Bitcoin.
If the Bitcoin protocol changed, then that consensus doesn't belong to Bitcoin anymore.

Less total circulating supply of Bitcoin becomes higher the price which an already said on early reply, think about as donation for those who've lost their Bitcoin and unrecoverable.

I was watching a video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_X3OwmKvkQ

In any case thanks for all the responses guys.

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I guess? but considering all the big dick companies and gov'ts are accumulating and hoarding most of the btc, maybe having more btc available could allow more average folks to jump into the market? Plus after all, bitcoin was meant to be 21 million, not 21 million, but X amount is missing! sadge.

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I didn't lose anything, just wondering.

What you should ask yourself us that in what protocol or conditions people who misplaced their bitcoin misplaced it, if you loss your bitcoin it depends on the kind of something you may engage yourself that warrant you to loss your bitcoin,  their is some certain things that we have to know towards bitcoin and it's misplacement, if you don't invest your bitcoin into a ponzi scheme I don't think you can loss your coin, secondly if you don't make your seed phrase to be known to public you can't loss your bitcoin, if you make use of a custodial wallet to save your bitcoin you would not loss your coins. So it depends the aspect you use for bitcoin investment.

Very unsure about the numbers - but sure, there are a lot of users who have to be willing to lose their bitcoin and in most cases it is the user's own fault.

The quote from Satoshi can be interpreted as meaning that every Bitcoin user is obliged to keep his private key well and safely. Losing your private key means you will lose your bitcoin - there is no guarantee of replacement, meaning you are fully responsible for the security of your wallet and bitcoin. If you can no longer access your wallet because you lost your private key - then you should forget about it forever and go back to the point satoshi said.

OP I think you or the person who has lost the funds should be more careful, although this claim of yours needs a little proof so please show that also to confirm whether you are saying true or not, and how did you lose the funds I mean did someone stole the keys, or you forget the keys and don't have any access to your funds now?

And is it was 4 to 5 million dollars worth of BTC! as your statement indicates as they are 4 to 5 million BTC which got lost not the 4 to 5 million dollars worth of BTC. I just searched on Google and it says that now a total of 3.7 million BTC have been lost out of 19.6 million circulating supply (Article is 2+ months old--> Source
That's why I love Satoshi hehe, He has swag.

The exact quote I was going to reference.
Bitcoin is built on scarcity model, the more it is lost, the more scarce it becomes and the more valuable.

How will you determine that a particular bitcoin in a particular address is lost. Maybe the owner is hodling.

Lost coins ??

There are plenty of people holding likely millions of Bitcoins with no intention to sell : HODL or so......

so if a person is doing this or if he lost his private keys, in both cases the Bitcoins are for an extended period out of circulation.......

So in my view no point worrying about "Lost Bitcoin" 

Do you really know and understand Bitcoin that much because this question looks like elementary kind for question anyone can ask about Bitcoin because it's look dummy.

Firstly, you need to know that Bitcoin protocol related to addictional coin minting is not happening anytime in the next 100 years, the supply is fixed and as far as.the community is concern, the 21 million will remained until the total 21 million is no longer available as subsidy for miner, we have 1.4 million Bitcoin remain to be mined which is going to happen until 29 more halving us done.

Nobody is sending bitcoin to anyone that lost there Bitcoin and I don't know where you got that stats from but even if they are going to do that(zero your mind, it's not happening), how do you think they going to do that? Send bitcoin to already wallet address they can't accept or what? Or they will come forward to identify them, that's another dumb thing to do, your idea is a baby idea, doesn't make sense.

1. It's not 4-6 million, more like 2-3 million probably. Also impossible to know exactly how many have been "lost".

2. No, they still exist, people have just lost their keys. No reason to replace them. "Replacing" them would mean changing the 21 million supply limit, which is one of the fundamental features of Bitcoin. Furthermore it would require a hard fork to change the protocol. There are only 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist. EVER, period. Extra Bitcoin are not made when someone loses their keys.

3. That's not how Bitcoin works. Heck, that's not how any currency works. If you lose a $5 bill do you tell the central bank to print an extra $5? No.


Also there was just a thread a couple weeks on here where someone proposed the same thing and people endlessly pointed out why its a terrible idea and would never happen anyway.

Yes, there have been two cases.

The coinbase transaction in block number 91722 has the same hash as coinbase transaction in block number 91880 and the coinbase transaction in block number 91812 has the same hash as coinbase transaction in block number 91842.
The bug made coins generated in blocks number 91722 and 91812 unspendable and was fixed with implementing BIP30 and BIP34.

Just like everyone, technically coins sent to addresses of which nobody knows the private key that created them, doesn't mean they are gone forever. There is always a chance (close to 0), that someone may find the necessary key to unlock the coins on these addresses.


Has this ever happened? Is there an example of such a case?

All the lost Bitcoin only mean a lower maximum supply. That causes the vaue of Bitcoin to go up. Less supply and more demand is just what we need. In fact, this will continue happening and Bitcoin value will continue rising. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Think of it this way: If a Bitcoiner loses his coins because they died or lost access to their wallet, all hodlers receive a kind of inheritence, automatically.

Is that not a great thing?

We should not change anything about this.

It may worth mentioning that there is no proof that 4-6 millions bitcoin have been lost. All you have read are only estimations.


The only coins that have been provably lost are as following.

• Coins that have been burned by creating OP_RETURN outputs
• Coins that were not claimed by miners when finding a block
• Coins that were lost due to coinbase transactions having the same hash.

When people lost bitcoin its bad for them but good for the community as there are less Amount circulating around and the price go upper
E.g if all people want to cashout bitcoin , there will still be Value on them due to high lost amount that cant be sold or cashout for real money  
so the Bitcoin Supply is at a current level of 19.63M -4-6 M  is around 25% of the amount

I dont think that there will ever be such an update as its impossible to know if one person is Holding those BTC or have lost them !

Who says that's true? The methodology used by various "analysts" to determine how much BTC was lost was (and probably still is) saying "this BTC hasn't moved in x years and we assume it's lost". Of course, that doesn't make much sense when we know that from time to time there are transactions with coins that haven't moved in more than 10 years.

Seems like this topic was already discussed a couple of days ago, and it was in the same format as well. Anyway for the answer I would say it's a + point that lost ones are lost forever. It will directly help in price appreciation with the demand and supply principle. Maybe in the future somehow if needed the lost coins can be taken care of but I'm sure the community will refuse any such proposal and I'm with this that there's no need of recovering the coins.

As OmegaStarScream quoted, if the number of Bitcoin you mentioned are actually lost, they are out of the ecosystem. No longer will be sold on any exchange or be traded with real money.
Making the Circulating Supply of Bitcoin from 19.63M to 14M. If there was a way to burn those, then it will surely create a big supply shock as it's almost 25% of Total Supply.

If someone has lost bitcoins they cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt that they own the address the bitcoins are in. The ultimate proof of ownership is the private keys of a wallet, and if you can't access a wallet you don't know the private keys, meaning there is no foolproof way to return lost coins to the last original owner.

Simply adding new coins into circulation to replace supposed lost coins is a terrible idea as it causes a supply shock and removes the confidence people have in Bitcoin to follow the already existing protocol.
Question would be what next would warrant thousands or millions of coins to be brought out if thin air?

Lost coins in theory are like a donation to the other bitcoin holders, but since nobody knows what coins are lost I think there is not rally a impact at this moment. The only coins that are really lost are OP_Return coins that were burned.
People for example always claim that around 1 million satoshi coins are lost. However you can never be sure of those coins would at one point move again and suddenly be sold. So I think because of this risk those "lost" coins are not really a push for the price.

So that thieves (who are not the actual owners of the coins) should be claiming lost coins?

They should prove with their private keys that they are the owners.

You can not know the exact number of bitcoin that are lost because you can not say all coins that are not moved to another address are lost. Or which methodology did you use to arrive at 4 to 6 million BTC to have been lost?

You called them lost coin, then why returning them?

If these Bitcoins should be returned, then it is not a decentralized system again.
Who is returning the coins?

The main problem here is that people that people that lost the coin had already lost it forever, if they are sending Bitcoin back, which wallets are they sending to, is the sending address or the receiving address?

The idea of not returning lost Bitcoins is good and has save a lot.
And mind you, any one that claim to recover lost Bitcoins to you is a scammer.

If there is a consensus to replace lost bitcoins, we will no longer have 21M bitcoins but will possibly be 25M bitcoins and more and more and more.

It will be like central banks print more fiat currencies to create inflation and cause decrease of purchasing power. Do you want to see Bitcoin has decreasing purchasing power?

I believe you won't want it.

What about the lost BTC?. Another topic on this created 7 days ago.

There is no protocol as that. Once Bitcoin is lost, it is gone forever. It cannot be recovered or reintroduced into the market's circulating supply. Any efforts to replace lost Bitcoin through a protocol or update is impossible, besides it would compromise the fundamental nature of the currency.

No there is nothing that will actually be done as of now to get those lost coins. As satoshi said earlier
So basically there is no plan to review anything on that. But come to think of it what does lost coins mean to you and how do you get those numbers because they vary and reason been that not all assumed coins said to be lost are actually lost except maybe locked coins that can never be spend (op-Return outputs)
. If not some of these coins are just coins left off and not yet moved or lost private key which can still be spent when seeing so they don’t count as lost coins

Yo,

So apparently there's like 4-6 million bitcoin that are lost and gone? Just curious if there was any ideas or plans to update the protocol to replace the lost bitcoins if there was a consensus, if that is even possible.