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

You can't compare losing your Bitcoin wallet now and 10 years ago. Now if you have 1 BTC in your wallet, you will surely remember that you have it. But 10 years ago I'm sure people were deleting wallets with hundreds and thousands of Bitcoin in it just because they weren't worth anything at that time.

This is actually good thing as well. If we do not have 21 million but only 14 million that means there are a lot less of it, and that means each of them should be valued even more. I mean right now we calculate it based on what the market shows how many there should be, but if there aren't that much, than it means we should be even higher in price when you calculate it with the right amount.

This is definitely a greater way to get out more value for bitcoin hence it should never be seen as a bad thing. Still, I am not sure when investors and traders will start speculating bitcoin value with "new" circulating supply ans once that kind of approach kicks off then we can see bitcoin prices to be flying higher than usual in every 4 year cycle.

It's a funny opinion by OP because we all know that you and I could make it so that there's never 21 million BTC. I could make a new wallet, send 0.001BTC to myself and delete the whole thing. Being the troll that I am I could claim that I broke Bitcoin because now there's never going to be 21 million in circulation

We don't need a million or 5 million to be lost for it to never actually reach 21m in circulation, but does it matter?


That's it. In 120 years when there's 20900000 coins mined we'll have quantum computing to worry about and maybe space exploration or alien invasion.
Also by that time half of the supply will probably be lost and 1 coin will be worth more than 1 million USD if fiat money even exists.

I'd expand this thought to include coins that are going to be lost (irretrievable) by the time we get to mine the last coin about more than 100 years from now.

If you think about it, we are 12 years into the process and nearing 19m mined bitcoins and in this short time we've managed to lose between 2.8 and 3.8 million coins. This means that if the lower number is correct, people were losing BTC250k a year! At that speed we'd need 40 years to lose half of the total supply of bitcoin, making it impossible to even have a circulating supply in 100 years, when the last coins are to be mined.

I don't expect bitcoin to survive 100 years in its current form, but something will have to be done along the way to make sure it doesn't self destruct. 

21 million supply of btc is one of the facts where btc is known so it's impossible for it to be forgotten but in fact this is always in the discussions. I always seen everyone talks about it either in the new topics/threads or just a random reply of a user. Lost coins is also important but not as important as the 21m supply of btc.

Lost bitcoins can be called to as a blessing of disguise because it makes the rest of btc more scarce but not all lost bitcoins are completely lost. I have seen news where are user suddenly recovers a lost btc or a crypto wallet that has a btc on it. The only way to determine that a btc is completely lost forever is when a user intended to lose it and he let anyone know.

I agree with you, while the total amount of mined bitcoins will eventually reach 21m, it doesn't mean that the world has full access to all these 21m. Due to theft and people losing access to their wallets the number of available bitcoins will be lower. That shouldn't be a big concern right now though. You could argue that the price should be higher, but that's just a matter of time.  The finite numbers of Bitcoins is what will make the price rise over time. As long as new bitcoins are being mined there exists a minimum price for bitcoins, given by the energy and running cost of miners. We are of course well above that price. So the rise in mining cost together with the halving means that prices have to rise more and more. At the moment its hard to say what the real price is, because the world is facing such uncertain times.

Yes it is true that many bitcoins have already been lost.  Many bitcoins have been locked due to unconsciousness And if Bitcoin has a specific supply then why isn't Bitcoin growing much? This is because Bitcoin has not yet spread to everyone.

It is estimated that only 3.9-4% of people worldwide use crypto from 100%.  And with approximately 18,000 businesses accepting crypto. The Bitcoin prices have risen 540,000% from btc release since only 4% of people worldwide use cryptocurrencies.  Bitcoin has reached an annual growth rate of 274% So have you ever wondered what the price of Bitcoin would be if 50% of people worldwide use Bitcoin?

This types of threads has been created many times if you look to search for them and we all know about that there will never be 21M coins in circulation due to lost coins and that owned on Satoshi's address.We can't make more because it will change the whole algorithm and disturb the network.So the world will still see the coins till 2140 which is huge time gap from current one so care about other things.

Why should we forget about it? That number is the strongest argument against fiat. 21 million represents what fiat is not. 21 million means Bitcoin couldn't be devalued the way governments and central banks do with their currencies.

As a matter of fact, on the contrary, you could forget about lost coins and focus on 21 million. Many lost coins are lost until they're found or recovered. If some coins are lost for good then, as Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned, they "only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more" and we could think of those lost coins "as a donation to everyone" of us.^[1] But is there a way to determine whether a Bitcoin is forever lost?

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[1] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1647

If you are learning the core of Bitcoin or what Bitcoin is, people must know by the beginning, there will be only 21 million Bitcoin will be generated.
You got a point that for that Bitcoin who already lost like wallets or private keys already lost and impossible to access anymore.
What's my take here is somehow they are "burned" which will help the supply of Bitcoin will decrease and by that, I believe it will also a good help somehow that it will increase the price of Bitcoin.

If a wallet address like legacy for example has bitcoin locked on his public key and has remained in active for some years, does that mean the private keys are lost? I think this hypothesis of lost private keys or lost btc should be discard, just two weeks back, we saw 10 years of BTC on the move to exchange.
I'm not sure what will happen to Satoshi share early mined bitcoin but I have this feeling that if the market becomes stable, he wouldn't still sell all at once. I remember billions of shib was airdroped to ethereum founder and it becomes even more stronger, bitcoin can do the same and will one day achieve a price that people will not fear Satoshi bitcoin liquidation.
What ever happened to the number of supply, try and get some for yourself, we never can tell tomorrow. 

Lets think off about these probabilities on which those dormant wallets would be always having the chance on moving after a long time of having no transactions or activity which we couldnt able to point out precisely

on what wallets are totally lost in void due to lost keys or had been completely forgotten or something like that.No one ever claims about 21M total bitcoins would circulate out yet we know and not that dumb to

consider out of  those lost coins which is really out of the circulation but well im not really stressing myself out considering that the last bitcoin would be mind would happen in year 2100+ as far as i remember.

I would argue that Bitcoin's market cap is realistically lower than it is displayed as, due to the lost coins.  If you start to look at it like that, you begin to wonder if other coins that don't have a shadow market cap are also overvalued as a result of comparison investing.  While I don't think anyone should forget that Bitcoin has a total of 21 million coins, as that is arguably the thing that brought most people to investing in Bitcoin in the first place, it is also good to be aware that there aren't ever going to actually be 21 million coins in circulation, and the market cap as a result is not as realistically high as is stated.  Then you can take from that information what you want.

There's also a misconception going around that 21 million isn't enough. When, technically at the moment we don't need use most of the denominations of Bitcoin. Whenever Bitcoin comes too scarce, the price of it theoretically should go up as long as there's demand, that means in twenty years or so, we'll likely be sending satoshi's rather than 0.1, 0.5, 1 BTC. In fact, you could go as far to say that despite fiat having an unlimited amount of supply via injecting more notes into circulation, Bitcoin is actually more scalable. Sounds like a contradiction, but I do believe there'll be a time where people become sick of battling inflation, and will look for alternatives which will cause crashes upon crashes of fiat, until it effectively gets replaced by another system. Whether, that's Bitcoin or not I don't know. Maybe, more scalability is a little inaccurate, but I'm lacking a better term right now. 
Which to some degree, I kind of wish we just said a maximum supply cap, rather than 21 million. 21 million technically is correct, except the realistic cap is much lower. I know we could be accused of being vague, and non transparent if we didn't exactly point out what the cap is, but in all reality the actual number doesn't matter all that much. What matters is that there's a cap, and therefore inflation should theoretically be minimal, or completely eradicated. Hence, why Bitcoin being called deflationary by design is thrown around.

I'm going to leave aside the technical aspect, which I think has been masterfully explained by BlackHatCoiner, and go to the financial aspect: to be honest with you, what I think is that you are not right.

The market knows that Bitcoin has a limit of 21 million that cannot be exceeded (unless there is an improbable future consensus to change the limit) and that many have been lost, which is the same as saying that almost everyone who invests in Bitcoin knows this. This means that the current price of Bitcoin includes that restricted part of the supply, therefore what it needs to rise further is more demand, not that people understand that there is a limit to production or that many have been lost, as you argue.


Btw, I've had a look at that address and I see it receiving small sums, even recently. Are people supposedly sending "donations" to Satoshi?

No, there will be 21M Bitcoin on the blockchain end of mine Bitcoin. We can't consider lost Bitcoin out of the total and maximum supply. It's because though lost Bitcoin isn't circulating but still exists on the chain. We don't know exactly who lost or who hold it forever. For example, we can't imagine right now what will happen with Satoshi's Bitcoin. Also, we don't know if you buy Bitcoin and lost it. So which thing we can't imagine shouldn't consider the fact in real life.

The demand is not that huge, so for me, there's no data that would back up on why the price now is undervalued. Most of the reasons on why bitcoin achieved its ATH was only due to hype, because if that is not due to hype, bitcoin could have not corrected this big now, from almost $70k and have dropped below $40k, that's a huge correction, right?

However, if we look at the big picture, bitcoin is pretty bullish of the low supply and continuously increasing of demand, and all I can say is that the current price is still cheap if we believe that massive adoption is waiting in the future.

Crypto community and financial world are already aware of this, so I think the price is where it should be for now... It's just that it's not the right time yet for bitcoin to highly increase in value yet.

Bitcoin is in second plan for wealthy investors for now. Their money must be somewhere else generating more profit than they could achieve with bitcoin at this moment. Once bitcoin becomes the most interesting opportunity for them again, we will see the price rising once more, exactly like last year.

On long run, the limited supply theory to explain the increasement in bitcoin's price makes total sense, but on the present time it doesn't make difference and proof of that is the currently bitcoin's value. As you said, pretty cheap!

There’s already a multiple news about old bitcoin miners have access on there Bitcoin after a very long time of forgetting it. This invalidate the theory of categorizing the lost tokens for just being dirmant for a long time since it can be recover by the owner any moment. 14M BTC is too huge to be considered as loss because we have no factual evidence for that assumption and just speculation. It’s better to still assume that those tokens is not in loss so that we will not be affected in case the token back in circulation.

Everyone knows the supply constraint but the question that everyone has is that whether there is a demand explosion which could probably happen in the near future? Because eventually pricing will be decided based on the demand explosion and not only the supply constraint, moreover one should not forget that utility of Bitcoin is derived from using it as a currency so if you aren't using it as a currency and just hodling it what good is bitcoin in that case??

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?