Topic: We should forget that there'll be 21M BTC - page 2. (Read 359 times)

Please read the comprehensive article How is the 21 million Bitcoin cap defined and enforced by Jameson Lopp.

You can know count or identify the exact number of lost Bitcoin. You can rely on some on-chain analytics to estimate a number of probably lost Bitcoin. In reality, the number of lost Bitcoin can be higher or smaller than your estimation as well as ones from experts.

Check the HODL waves and make your estimation. I don't think we need to get exact number because the importance is it helps us to realize the scarcity of Bitcoin

looking at raw data on the blockchain. looking at transactions.. there are no btc.

everything is measured in units of 'sats'
there will be a maximum of 2,099,999,997,690,000 sats mined.
where alot of them have already been locked to keys that people have lost/forgot the private key of

btc is not an actual hard data token or unit that is measured in hard bytes, nor stored in databases or files. its just a mathematical multiplication of a bundle of sats for easy description

its much like saying a bundle of fish is called a school. but in reality fish do not have a educational building. its just a term used to describe a bunch of units put together

as for the satoshi nakamoto stash.
many years ago some smart people actually done some analysis on the mined coins of 2009-10 and worked out a pattern of certain individuals mining activity (using the nonce and extranonce details) to work out that the user that made the transaction to hal finney,(satoshi sent them to him) had access to coins of a certain pattern which when comparing it to the pattern of other mined coins..
5,000,000,000sat associated with a key pair with thousands of keys like this showing the same mining pattern totalling >100,000,000,000,000sat combined
(or in lazy math thousands of keys of 50btc totalling>1m btc associated with a certain mining pattern)

We use 21 million simply because its' the technically correct number(rounded up). But really, the 21 million doesn't matter that much — it's just a number to give people a clearer picture that bitcoin is scarce with a maximum supply cap.

When I say "Satoshi's coins" I mean those early P2PK ones. I know that it's an improper title, but what I find even more wrong is to consider those lost. We've no idea who owns what and yet we treat them like they'll never move while we periodically observe some folks who move coins after 10-12 years.

               This may or may not isn't really something we can know for sure with our current progress. But in the future, it is possible when technologies are more advanced. Who knows maybe in the dawn of quantum computers, those lost bitcoins would be cracked and be used by the ones who cracks theur seed phrases or private keys. But then again, I doubt that a lot of us would he able to reach such time in the future.

Because there is no such thing as "Satoshi's coins". In other words you can not point to any UTXO and claim with certainty that this coin belongs to Satoshi (or anyone else for that matter).
The only 2 exceptions that apply (and I know of) are:
1. Any coins that are sent to Genesis block's key.
2. Any coins that are sent to this address since this is the only address Satoshi claimed to own (sent 10BTC from it to Hal Finney).

Any of those coins that consist the "1 million" total could have been mined by anyone else and move at some point by that person. Or even if they are Satoshi's, Satoshi can still move them at some point so they can not be considered lost.

The moto is that there'll never be more than 21M BTC.

Lost bitcoins can be categorized in provably lost and non-provably lost. Provably lost coins consist of:

• Those in OP_RETURN transactions.
• Those that were decided to not be claimed by the miners, such as in block 124724 where an unknown miner burnt 0.01000001 BTC (0.01 from fees + 0.00000001 from block reward).
• Those in transactions where the user messed up with the script. For instance, the 2,609 irredeemable BTC where the user failed to push the pubkey to the script.
• Those that are, deliberately, not part of the database, such as the genesis block's reward.

Non-provably lost coins consist of:

• Wallet files, seed phrases and generally private keys that are stated by their owners as lost.
• Those in the so called "burning addresses", such as 1111111111111111111114oLvT2.
• Satoshi's coins. (That I haven't understood yet why)

While in the former, the coins are gone for good, no one can guarantee that the other coins won't be moved in the future. For example, I suspect that due to the revealing of the public keys (of every P2PK output), they'll be brought into circulation at some point in the future because of the development of quantum computing.

I don't know who will ever believe that there are still 21 million coins to be circulated even the all bitcoin mined .

because there are already tons of Bitcoin that has been accepted being lost in the past .

but 14 million ? it may ot may not? but who really cares if ever there are only 14 million or less?

Not sure what you meant when you said that Satoshi is incarcerated
When it comes to the issue of lost bitcoins, it's very difficult to know how much is actually lost. Some people consider coins that haven't moved in a decade to be lost. Although that can be true and is true for some of the coins, it's not an absolute certainty. The person could have simply decided not to touch those coins yet.

Some people have died and took their secrets to where they hid their private keys/seeds with them to the grave. Maybe in the future, their relatives discover a box hidden inside the wall. Magically, some of the coins that were considered as lost suddenly start moving.   

Individuals should completely disabuse themselves of the notion that there will ever be 21 million Bitcoins


Taking lost and inaccessible coins into consideration, as well as Satoshi's 1M BTC lockup, there will never be more than 14M BTC available. Coins that have been lost are irretrievable.
Wallets that have been locked are inaccessible. And who knows what will become of Satoshi's incarceration. This number will steadily drop as adoption expands, as additional people with bad discipline, a lack of responsibility, or an inability to pay attention will also lose their coins. Bitcoin is obviously highly cheap, but it becomes much more so when you consider the premise that only 21 million Bitcoins will ever be created. If the larger crypto community and the financial world were aware of this, Bitcoin's price would be considerably higher right now.

What do you think?