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Topic: Lost Bitcoin and possible future scarcity - page 2. (Read 350 times)

legendary
Activity: 1526
Merit: 1359
  • Do you think all dormant wallet (long inactive wallets) are gone forever?

Of course not. It would be foolish to think that way.

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  • As we are not certain of Satoshi's return, should we be bothered about his dormant wallets?

I see no reason why.

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  • do you think lost Bitcoin can cause Bitcoin scarcity in the future?

Thats kind of obvious.  If there is less of something, of course that means it is scarcer.

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  • From a total of 21million total supply, can you attempt a prediction guess of the total number of Bitcoin that would be in active wallets after all Bitcoin has been mined?

You mean in 100 or so years? Well, thats a long way off.  Human civilization itself might be a whole different story by then.  Predicting something so specific is impossible.
sr. member
Activity: 728
Merit: 444
Answers to discussion questions.
  • I do not really know whether it is lost forever because it is still possible that the owner of the wallet who is inactive due to the death of the owner has submitted or inherited a private key or seed phrase to other parties who are trusted.
It is likely that if upon the death of the owner, there was no hand over of seed phrase, then it is lost forever. I remember the guy who lost his drive where he had his bitcoin wallet in a dump. He's been looking for it for years and cannot find it. It could also be considered lost forever.

  • As we are not certain of Satoshi's return, should we be bothered about his dormant wallets?
We shouldn't major in minor things so it is said. I know Satoshi's dormant wallet entering into the market will be a major thing but for now I cannot be bothered about his dormant account.[/list]
hero member
Activity: 952
Merit: 555
20BET - Premium Casino & Sportsbook
Discussion Questions
  • Do you think all dormant wallet (long inactive wallets) are gone forever?

The question or challenges here is on how to identify the difference between a lost wallet and the one which is inactive, the issue is on how to know or differentiate between the two of them, how can we know if someone holding for a long time is still in charge of his wallet or not.

  • As we are not certain of Satoshi's return, should we be bothered about his dormant wallets?

How does the two correlate, we don't care about Satoshi nor his wallet, if at all he has been dead, then he's very smart enough to leave the access to those coins with his family or children, but we are not having a clear evidence on his whereabouts.[/list]
hero member
Activity: 1176
Merit: 785
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For example, Satoshi Nakamoto happens to mine the first block. The Genesis address created holds about 99.85 BTC and is currently a dormant wallet. There are also speculations that Satoshi might have thousands of dormant wallets as they were used to receive block rewards. By subtracting the amount of Lost Bitcoin from 21 million, it is likely that we are left with an amount lesser than the total supply when unlocked.
According to speculation, we are made to believe that Satoshi owns over 1 million Bitcoin, whereas according to the real time value of the total circulating supply of BTC at the time of writing this post is said to be 19,696,950 BTC,  which means if we are to subtract Satoshi's acclaimed 1 million BTC, what will be left for both lost+unlost BTC currently in circulation will be 18,696,950 BTC.

 
Credit:www.visualcapitalist.com

However, according to data about the top holders of Bitcoin, I'm made to understand that;
1. Microstrategy  174,530 Btc
2. Galaxy                17,518  Btc
3. Marathon            13,716 Btc
4. Tesla                    10,500 Btc
5. HUT8                     9,366 Btc
6. Coinbase               9,181 Btc
7. BLOCK                   8,027 Btc
8. RIOT                       7,327 Btc
9. HIVE                       2,596 Btc
10. Clean Spark        2,575 Btc
11. NEXON                1,717 Btc
12. EXODUS              1,651 Btc

Of which if you are to sum up all the Bitcoins been held by worlds top corporate holders, it gives us only 258,704 BTC. Whereas, If you are to subtract both Satoshi's acclaimed amount of 1million and the one been held by these top corporate holders, you will be left with  18,438,246 BTC (i.e both lost and unlost).
hero member
Activity: 714
Merit: 1010
Crypto Swap Exchange
The standard for owning Bitcoin is by having a wallet (ideally a non-custodial wallet), which contains: a private key that gives full control of the coins, and also a public address (wallet address) that allows individuals to receive and verify transactions on the Blockchain.

A Bitcoin wallet usually contains a lot of private keys, from which associated public keys and public addresses are derived by known cryptographic recipies. But yes, normally you need to have the private key to move coins in the blockchain. The blockchain itself doesn't know or use public addresses, those are only recipies for how to construct so-called unlock scripts for coins.


As designed in the Bitcoin protocol, there can be only 21 million BTC in circulation, even though other enthusiasts might think otherwise due to proven calculations and reasons not to estimate.

By design there can be only 20,999,999.9769BTC, of which some are provably lost or unspendable (as already said e.g. the Genesis block coinbase subsidy of 50BTC is unspendable, even if you had the private key; there are few examples of miners who didn't claim the total allowed block subsidy and transaction fees, those unclaimed coins are forever lost, too; any coins sent to OP_RETURN outputs are burned and lost; ...).


Dormant wallets, also known as hibernated wallets, are considered to house lost Bitcoins. Identifying the total number of lost bitcoins can be very challenging or even impossible due to the fact that there are several inactive wallets connected to the Blockchain, making it impossible to tell who is holding and who has lost.

Why those should be considered lost coins? Elaborate, please!

There might be a likelyhood that early coins are lost coins because wallets were deleted when Bitcoin didn't yet had a accepted value. But we can't know if those are really lost.


For example, Satoshi Nakamoto happens to mine the first block. The Genesis address created holds about 99.85 BTC and is currently a dormant wallet. There are also speculations that Satoshi might have thousands of dormant wallets as they were used to receive block rewards. By subtracting the amount of Lost Bitcoin from 21 million, it is likely that we are left with an amount lesser than the total supply when unlocked.

With 100% certainty blocks 0 (Genesis) and block 9 can be attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto (Satoshi sent some coins from coinbase of block 9 to Hal Finney and this is well documented).

See http://satoshiblocks.info/, there's some scientific evidence that Satoshi mined around 21954ish blocks (this yields ~1.1million BTC). Every of those coinbase outputs were mined to a public key, never to a public address!

This bitcoinexplorer.org lists blocks with a miner attribution.


There are hundreds, if not thousands, of dormant wallets that house Bitcoin of different amounts. When we calculate all together, we realize that we are short of the total supply, which I think would trigger scarcity as more people would want to hold the ones available.

Why are you so concerned about dormant wallets exactly? We can't really calculate them all together, except maybe that you could put them into buckets of unspent age. But that doesn't give you any certainty if those are only dormant or provably lost. What's the fuss about them anyway?


I added my answers in color.
Discussion Questions
  • Do you think all dormant wallet (long inactive wallets) are gone forever?
    No, but some may be. We can't know.
  • As we are not certain of Satoshi's return, should we be bothered about his dormant wallets?
    Not at all.
  • do you think lost Bitcoin can cause Bitcoin scarcity in the future?
    Provably lost ones, yes. But Bitcoin is already of finite scarcity, who cares if more or less?
  • From a total of 21million total supply, can you attempt a prediction guess of the total number of Bitcoin that would be in active wallets after all Bitcoin has been mined?
    No, likely impossible. The only certainty is: the pile of lost coins only grows, never shrinks.
mk4
legendary
Activity: 2870
Merit: 3873
📟 t3rminal.xyz
  • Do you think all dormant wallet (long inactive wallets) are gone forever?
Of course not. There have been wallets that's been around for a decade then suddenly became active.

  • As we are not certain of Satoshi's return, should we be bothered about his dormant wallets?
No. Because it's his money. He should do whatever he wants with it.

  • do you think lost Bitcoin can cause Bitcoin scarcity in the future?
Even dormant wallets already sort of provide some 'scarcity' due to the fact that they're off the markets.

  • From a total of 21million total supply, can you attempt a prediction guess of the total number of Bitcoin that would be in active wallets after all Bitcoin has been mined?
Around 500k lost probably. Just a random guess.
legendary
Activity: 3542
Merit: 1352
Since these questions were already asked before, I'll just say most of the common answers other members have given over time.

The number of bitcoins in dormant addresses are considered as dormant because we don't have a way to know for certain if the keys are lost or not. Even today, most of the figures you might read on the internet regarding these 'lost coins' are guesstimates wherein they get the number of bitcoins sitting on wallets for a certain period of time.

Even if you come up with a sensible equation or analysis to get an exact number of coins that would no longer be in circulation ever, it will never be correct as there had been some cases wherein dormant coins were transferred to another wallet after 10 years or more.
sr. member
Activity: 616
Merit: 442
Forum Only For Fun
Answers to discussion questions.
  • I do not really know whether it is lost forever because it is still possible that the owner of the wallet who is inactive due to the death of the owner has submitted or inherited a private key or seed phrase to other parties who are trusted.
  • I don't feel disturbed.
  • Can be a cause of scarcity based on the amount of Bitcoin 21 million BTC.
  • No.

In the precautionary measures of the loss of Bitcoin, all of these points I agree and I think whoever the owner of Bitcoin is currently stored in a special wallet, it is necessary to pass on people who can believe like wives/husbands to be used properly as assets. The act of passing down needs to be done on an ongoing basis until the child for his future.

I never knew how other people did it, but in my opinion bequeathed Bitcoin the actions that I would take if I had large amounts of bitcoin.
sr. member
Activity: 364
Merit: 298
The Genesis address created holds about 99.85 BTC and is currently a dormant wallet.

The genesis address holds 50 bitcoins less than that, because the genesis block reward is unspendable. 

There are also speculations that Satoshi might have thousands of dormant wallets as they were used to receive block rewards.

Satoshi definitely mined lots of the first blocks, and since these coins remain untouched, if he is alive and possesses the keys, it's plausible that he could own thousands, or even millions, of coins. 

From a total of 21million total supply, can you attempt a prediction guess of the total number of Bitcoin that would be in active wallets after all Bitcoin has been mined?

There are a few thousand provably lost coins, but beyond that, our knowledge is limited.  Speculating about lost coins doesn't seem valuable given the high level of uncertainty surrounding our conclusions.  I hope this addresses all of your concerns.  There isn't anything more to say. 
legendary
Activity: 2912
Merit: 6403
Blackjack.fun
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of dormant wallets that house Bitcoin of different amounts. When we calculate all together, we realize that we are short of the total supply, which I think would trigger scarcity as more people would want to hold the ones available.

Yup, that's the whole idea and the appeal of Bitcoin, lost coins are lost, we don't print more to have a constant supply, and nobody but the free market cares if some coins are truly lost or are just asleep in someone's wallet.

Discussion Questions
  • Do you think all dormant wallet (long inactive wallets) are gone forever?
  • As we are not certain of Satoshi's return, should we be bothered about his dormant wallets?
  • do you think lost Bitcoin can cause Bitcoin scarcity in the future?
  • From a total of 21million total supply, can you attempt a prediction guess of the total number of Bitcoin that would be in active wallets after all Bitcoin has been mined?

Apart from number 3 which is clearly a yes since, well, that's how things work, for all the rest nobody would know the answer, maybe Satoshi himself on the second but for anyone else is just crystal globe territory.
But most important, lost coins don't pose a problem, will not pose a problem in the future and if someone thinks oh no we will only have 1 million Bitcoins in 2100, it's not like,  that we will still have 100 trillion satoshis. Wink

full member
Activity: 252
Merit: 175
cout << "Bitcoin";
Bitcoin is a decentralized network and also a digital currency that uses a peer-to-peer system to process and verify transactions. These transactions are recorded on a public ledger, also called the Blockchain.

The standard for owning Bitcoin is by having a wallet (ideally a non-custodial wallet), which contains: a private key that gives full control of the coins, and also a public address (wallet address) that allows individuals to receive and verify transactions on the Blockchain.

As designed in the Bitcoin protocol, there can be only 21 million BTC in circulation, even though other enthusiasts might think otherwise due to proven calculations and reasons not to estimate.

The concept of Bitcoin scarcity is strongly tied to halving events where rewards of miners are reduced, thereby decreasing the amount of Bitcoin entering circulation. In more detail, the total supply (21 million) remains constant, while circulating supply keeps increasing as long as mining continues, but the amount entering circulation is reduced by halving, thereby leading to more demand.

In addition to scarcity, Lost Bitcoins happens to be a significant contributor. Dormant wallets, also known as hibernated wallets, are considered to house lost Bitcoins. Identifying the total number of lost bitcoins can be very challenging or even impossible due to the fact that there are several inactive wallets connected to the Blockchain, making it impossible to tell who is holding and who has lost.

For example, Satoshi Nakamoto happens to mine the first block. The Genesis address created holds about 99.85 BTC and is currently a dormant wallet. There are also speculations that Satoshi might have thousands of dormant wallets as they were used to receive block rewards. By subtracting the amount of Lost Bitcoin from 21 million, it is likely that we are left with an amount lesser than the total supply when unlocked.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of dormant wallets that house Bitcoin of different amounts. When we calculate all together, we realize that we are short of the total supply, which I think would trigger scarcity as more people would want to hold the ones available.

Discussion Questions
  • Do you think all dormant wallet (long inactive wallets) are gone forever?
  • As we are not certain of Satoshi's return, should we be bothered about his dormant wallets?
  • do you think lost Bitcoin can cause Bitcoin scarcity in the future?
  • From a total of 21million total supply, can you attempt a prediction guess of the total number of Bitcoin that would be in active wallets after all Bitcoin has been mined?

In addition, here are ...
Possible Causes of Lost Bitcoin
  • Death of the holder
  • Transferring to the wrong network or address (though some wallet software can detect this and notify the sender before the button is hit)
  • Inability to remember memorized or find written seed phrases
  • Wallet compromise such as phishing hacks, etc.

Preventive Measures
  • The use of private hardware wallets (cold wallets) is strongly encouraged.
  • Seed phrases should never be memorized, nor written on a mobile device or computer. They can be written on paper or in a book that shouldn't be visible to external members and should be strongly protected.
  • Having a backup of your documented seed phrase is crucial in case of unplanned circumstances like a fire outbreak.

Genesis block - https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa
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