I have a feeling this is a reason why bitcoins will never work... People can easily lose their coins. So that 21 million isn't going to hold up. Even if 1 million is lost, that would have a huge impact on Bitcoins. Litecoins also... they shouldn't have a certain cap at how much can be mined. They should be able to control it, make the mining easy when more are needed in the economy, and make mining difficult when it's not needed.
Also, credit cards/debit cards that ran off Bitcoins would be a plus
Topic: Number of bitcoins lost forever - page 2. (Read 1337 times)
I started mining in October and I reformatted my PC a few weeks after I started... I wasn't all that serious about it yet and forgot to back it up. Lost a couple hundred lol. Wonder if some sudden loss in thousands of bitcoins will ever happen to bump up the prices
I know a few people myself who've lost several hundred in HD wipes. So yeah the number is probably significant.
It's really hard to peg, as you said; there's just no way to really know. For informational purposes, we can assume wallets which havn't activity for years are lost, but that says nothing of wallets lost recently...
I'm guessing it's a big number, tho. It's just never going to be 21,000,000.
I'm guessing it's a big number, tho. It's just never going to be 21,000,000.
I have seen wide ranging estimates of this, and I think it's a very important question to study the bitcoin economy. A few public cases have been reported of large sums of bitcoin lost due to hardware malfunction, lost keys, etc . I assume a good chuck of the coins from the early days of mining have been lost. For instance when you look up the first 1000+ blocks a lot of the 50btc that were mined are still in the same addresses (most of them are different) , I would assume these are lost ? unless you think they are just dormant waiting on Satoshi to awaken hi master wallet ....
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