Topic: Total BTC 7,796,150 in the wild currently ? (Read 1937 times)

Aaah ok, I did not realise the address contains a checksum. That clarifies it. Cheers.

Not me.  The vanitygen program!

Sounds like you've discovered a way to 'treasure hunt' ?  Not a bad idea.

Here is how an address like 1BRMLAB7nryYgFGrG8x9SYaokb8r2ZwAsX is found:


After running this algorithm for a reasonable amount of time the key pair that generated 1BRMLAB7nryYgFGrG8x9SYaokb8r2ZwAsX was found.

If you run the program again to find another vanity address that starts with 1BRMLAB you will find a totally different key pair and a totally different public address.  It will be just another one of the very large number of public key addresses that just happen to start with 1BRMLAB.

First a public address does not contain just random characters.  It is a structure that is calculated from the public key which itself is a structure being a point in the eliptical curve group.  You realize they all start with the number 1, right?  Well the entire structure is defined as:

address = base58(versionbyte + ripemd160(sha256(pubkey)) + hashCheck)

where hashCheck = first4bytesof(sha256(sha256(versionbyte + ripemd160(sha256(pubkey)))))

and versionbyte is 0 in the real network and 111 in the test network.

Second, these addresses could not be made by vanitygen - it would take too long.  And by too long I mean the following:

Here are some estimates for generating some addresses using just my laptop.  You can extrapolate to a faster system, even a GPU system or even 100,000 GPUs and see that it is “impossible”:


So if you are going to go to all this trouble why not try to guess the richest public address instead of some small number of lost BTC?  For example:

1LJY4ey9FVKKuodaDr84sdZDXLy5o8nFDY which as of the end of October contained 105,000 BTC, or about $250,000.00

From above you can kind see that it would take a “long” time to find the key pair that generated any one public address like the one above.

In fact the vanitygen program will not calculate how long it would take (too large) but to just get most of it (which does not get you the coins) here is the output from the program showing that you have a 50% chance of finding only most of it in 6e32 years:

C:\downloads\www.bitcoin.org>vanitygen 1LJY4ey9FVKKuodaDr84sdZDXLy
Difficulty: 2794725737275825531787289201741966674434639341
[102.98 Kkey/s][total 1497088][Prob 0.0%][50% in 5.965101e+032y]

I respectfully disagree that this is a correct conclusion. If these addresses were made up, why would they contain random characters? The address can be any base58-encoded string. The public key of the recipient is unknown, it's not a part of the blockchain. Why not then just make up any address that does not contain random chars?

At the Prague bitcoin conference, I was at one of the Prague hackspaces and bought a beer with Bitcoins. The payment address they have in their "store" is 1BRMLAB7nryYgFGrG8x9SYaokb8r2ZwAsX (brmlab -> name of the hackspace). Why would they put a fake address for payments up on the wall?

Or probably someone have run Vanity Gen for long time or are simply lucky to have such adreses.

I think it may be possible to figure out some of the coins that have been destroyed on purpose.  But it is probably not worth the effort because my method would only account for a small part of the BTC that have been lost or destroyed.

My idea would be to search for and find all addresses like the following addresses by searching for longer strings of words and phrases (in any language):


and add up all the BTC sent to these and other addresses like them.  All of these BTC have been destroyed on purpose.

Exactly!  

Unfortuneatly there is no way to tell how many coins are lost forever due to lost wallet.dat files or other malfunctions. Maybe they are hoarded and sitting in a flash drive in unabomber's cabin.

"hacked" coins aren't lost, for instance. they just belong to someone else now.

I don't know if you have see this but check out http://ecdsa.org/stats.html

If you take your cursor and run it across the graph from left to right is animates BTC movemment.

If you take your cursor all the way to the right and then pick a point in time, let say one year ago, and then calculate the blue area from day one through the day one year ago this blue area would represent all BTC that have not moved in over one year (lost, destroyed, saved/hoarded).

Notice the large number of BTC that were created in the first year that have never moved.  I believe that in that time when BTC was just a "toy" some (many?) people ran their CPU miners, got bored with it and then deleted the program (lost forever), others collected a bunch when they were basically free and are sitting on them = the "early adopters"

Didn't you hear! Warren Buffet the other Buffet  is "the manipulator"  that everyone talks about! pass me the corona with lime in it! 

This is great news! Now that we've done the math, I'm sure Jimmy Buffet with Berkshire Hathaway will soon be adding Bitcoin to their portfolio. Pass me that tequila. Not that one! The one with the worm in it.

Didn't have an opinion one way or the other just didn't know where all the coins could be but 78 btc each person not bad! 

So that means the "Early Adopters" are hoarding an average of 78 BTC. Dang those rich people!

hmmm good point ...Ok, I concede that point I meant "erased" as in " lost wallet dat. on people's computers say if the hard drive was erased.

Coins don't get "erased".

Ummm that is a lot of bitcoins assuming a lot got lost / hacked / erased   but assuming there is still a lot of BTC out there where the hell do all these coins reside ? I saw some number like there are only 100,000 or less Bitcoin users total out there  so like 100,000 / 7,796,150 BTC means a lot of people have bitcoins?

what am I missing here ?