Topic: What about the lost BTC? (Read 1545 times)

Ok understood. I am a bit confused why would they ask for a memo tag for USDT transactions? That is the first time I have ever heard that. I know that exchanges ask for a memo tag when you send XMR transactions. But other than that, this is new to me and actually very confusing because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But you know, most importantly you got your coins back. If you ask me, it is theft by ByBit, isn't it? Why would they need a memo tag if you can prove that your deposit address on ByBit was the receiving address of the amount you sent from Kucoin? Doesn't the blockchain show that your ByBit address has had an incoming transaction?

As I said, good to know someone took responsibility although I doubt it was the right party here. Kudos for Kucoin although I am not the biggest fan of these exchanges.

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I get your point here as I myself have a good example. It is not about 100 years, but just recently I had to clean up a barn that was like in a horror movie full with stuff and spiderwebs and all sorts of dirt. It was from my grandfather who is now dead for a while, but nobody from the family got down to do it. Now my grandfather would probably not be holding any BTC if he still lived, but now the new generations might well hold some BTC and put the seed in any form in some cupboard or chest, which then gets carried into the barn when someone dies. I can tell that nobody ever had a closer look at that barn for well over 25 years. This would be a scenario where one day someone could find a steel plate with a seed. We found all kinds of stuff and if it was 30 years later now, I would have been watching out for any disks or mediums that could carry important data for sure.


I know, it is more like getting your opinion and do some speculation although neither am I a friend of speculation nor are you as I know. It is just that sometimes those are the things going through my head since I am involved with bitcoin.


Very true and one day even one of the most important inventions ever might be gone: the wheel! Nobody would have ever thought that's possible, but levitation by electromagnets and other technologies are no impossibility anymore. I have just got the feeling that bitcoin could at least be similar to the wheel in terms of its significance as an innovation and its relevance and longevity. It is groundbreaking technology, not only an upgrade to something.


Makes sense, and it is not like I would spend all day with these futuristic scenarios. Sometimes it just results from the talks we have here.



Exactly. Some years ago I have had a similar issue with some shitcoins when I deposited BNB to an ETH network deposit address or something. I can't recall exactly what it was, and the exchange first told me they didn't have the keys, which is bullshit as it is the same key for both the ETH and BNB network. At first they tried to let me hanging by telling me some absolutely ridiculous story about how keys work for ETH and BNB, and once they realized they won't get rid of me, they asked for an astronomical fee to send the BNB back. The fee was higher than the amount that was at risk. Ever since I am avoiding all of these shitty exchanges. That's why I am positively surprised that Kucoin solved that problem. It's usually not quite their conduct.

Lost forever—and perhaps it should remain that way!

We konw that people have lost a ton of Bitcoin, maybe up to 5 million BTC, which is about a quarter of the total supply. Since Bitcoin has a fixed limit of 21 million coins, some folks think we should add more to make up for the lost ones. But messing with Bitcoin's supply could really shake things up. Its value comes from being scarce, and changing that could freak out investors. Plus, getting everyone to agree on this would be a nightmare and could set a bad precedent. So, while it sucks that so much Bitcoin is lost, keeping the rules as they are is probably best for stability.

If I am said not to read what other people have said here, that might be true. But I want to say that there is no increase in the amount of bitcoin to be equal between 21 million Bitcoin and the missing. 21 million is the total amount, if Bitcoin is about 1/4 or more, it is an incorrect owner's fault in maintaining and protecting Bitcoin. Seed phrase or private key is quite important that needs to be maintained and stored properly even though the wallet is deleted. By maintaining well and correctly, then most likely the owner of Bitcoin can get it back.

The amount of bitcoin lost due to no longer able to find or no longer able to remember the seed phrase or because of other factors, from what I know is true.

The total supply Satoshi planned for Bitcoin is 21 million, it wouldn't change(add or get reduced) in any circumstances in the future. so whatever is to happen to the mined 21 million bitcoin in the future, nothing will change the status quo of bitcoin having 21 million bitcoin in circulation. This clarifies that any lost bitcoin that will be lost or already lost along the line of bitcoin existence is gone forever and it cannot be replaced by anyone to make an equalized 21 million bitcoin in circulation. Therefore, bitcoin remain what it is of having 21 million bitcoin in circulation. The best you can do for yourself is to safeguard your seed phrase to avoid lost because nobody will think of compensate you when you experience a lost BTC

We could think of quite a few different scenarios in which keys might be thought to be lost over a very long period of time, and yeah, maybe the scenarios for recovery 200 years down the road are not as good as a shorter timeline, such as 50 to 100 years.. and a person could have lost his seed, or forgot that he put it on steel in the garden.. and a person down the road comes across the information and realizes that it is a seed phrase.. so then recovers the coins in whatever wallets are then available... or someone might even think that he had destroyed some keys.. but he did not destroy all of the copies... again someone else (in the future or 50, 100, 200 or some other quantity of years) comes across the seed words or whatever form of password (or recovery system that is then being used)... and he figures out how to check them and/or to recover them... sometimes it could be a matter of putting together a puzzle.. to put various parts of the puzzle together in order to see that it is a seed phrase.. and maybe even some of the seed words were written in order and others were written backwards, so there could be some back and forth tries before finally coming across the combination that opens the wallet.



We still don't know what we don't know - which especially pertains to things that might happen in the future...so yeah, right now bitcoin seems as the best thing since sliced bread, but we cannot know if there might be some way in which it might be broken and/or superseded.


I am not going to claim to know a lot of these things, and surely sometimes we might not need to know the specific inventions and/or break-throughs to predict the future, yet sometimes certain kinds of changes, inventions or happenings can greatly change future trajectories.. and perhaps some things (events/happening) could contribute towards changes in either direction in terms of loss of technologies and powers or the gaining of more technologies and powers, but then there can be various strains with social interactions and even the numger of people who might be able to have knowledge in certain fields and to be able to share or to pass down knowledge.. and maybe some kinds of knowledge come from doing things, and if we might not know how certain things are done, then the break down of some of the more sophisticated systems could end up in breakdowns of progress. and maybe having to start over in some technological areas.
 

There still seem to be limitations regarding the ability to move information, so we can have our various imaginations regarding bitcoin in space - while some of the on the earth practicalities seem a lot more concrete - even though we might not be able to rule out various kinds of unexpected advances that could end up changing how we consider if there might actually be real applications that go beyond this particular planet.. so I personally don't spend too much time thinking about those kinds of BIGGER brained ideas that I have difficulties recognizing in terms of what I perceive to be more concrete real world applications.


Your coins were not lost in the same sense that we are using the term in this thread.  Between Kucoin, ByBit and you, there seemed to have been some confusion regarding who had the coins.. so yeah you sent them and the coins were moved, and between the two exchanges they also had to figure out who had the coins, but they were never lost...

Now if one or the other exchange had lost the coins or sent the coins to a burner address or some other way of losing the keys, then the coins had the potential of actually being lost, but in your case they were not lost... just had gone missing (seemingly temporarily) with some potential lack of clarity (at least from you) regarding where the coins/keys were, and perhaps the exchanges knew where the coins were, but there seemed to have had been some automation of their coin processing systems involved and perhaps there were some needs for personal intervention to figure out where the keys (coins) were.. but the mere fact that you did not know or you could not figure out where the coins were, did not necessarily mean that one or the other exchanges did not know where the coins/keys were, even if Kucoin required you to start an investigation (and to pay them $40 USDT) in order to supposedly investigate into the matter.

We should all take it this way that the lost Bitcoin even added more value to all our Bitcoin. No other Bitcoin fork can actually work and many have been put out and all those failed so it's better to start getting used to the actual limited amount. What you should be worried even is for all these big companies like micro strategy and big whales not to actually hold all the major Bitcoin as they are already currently doing.

Here's the thing, there's some way we can retrieve those, but that would be too much trouble legally and technologically, soon as the lost bitcoins are retrieved everyone who lost their coins, and even those who not will speak up about it hoping to get their piece of the pie back. Issues will arise and this will become a problem. I think the system is better off for now not dealing with the lost bitcoins, after all, it's going to take at least a hundred years or so for all bitcoins to be mined so we still have time aplenty to prep things up, and of course, stock up on bitcoins. It's also worth noting that bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency on the market right now, there are literally hundreds of safe choices out there to choose from and you'd still be able to make a bag out of them.

I think you can get more information on what happened to me in this link. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/resolved-my-funds-are-missing-in-kucoinbybit-exchange-what-should-i-do-5500004 read all the links so that will understand the missed coins. And to recap it all. I bought bitcoin from someone through p2p which I normally do, and send them to Kucoin but when I wanted to sell it I transferred them to ByBit which I didn't include the memo tag and the coins were lost so I have to battle with the two exchanges until finally it was Kucoin refunded back the coins to me although ByBit also refunded them to Kucoin and in return Kucoin also did their part. But I pay a service fee and the matter was resolved.

@Agbe how did you "lose" coins on a centralized exchange that needed to be refunded? Have you been hacked? Or why would the centralized exchange have to refund lost coins? If it was the access to your account, it all comes down to whether or not it was an exchange you have provided KYC to or whether you can prove the identity tied to the email address you used to sign up at the exchange. I am bit confused because losing coins that have to be refunded on an exchange is usually a case when the exchange is to blame for a hack. Otherwise it makes little sense.

As for a lost back up seeds, I think it is relatively hypothetical that someone finds it after 200 years when the initial owner probably did everything to detect them, or accidentally destroyed them. But I do think that the bitcoin blockchain is an architecture that has a very good chance to survive for a very, very long time. Because after all, what other architecture that is publicly verifiable for everyone, free from SPOFs and resolves the Byzantine Generals problem?

When companies like Neuralink are successful and we all control everything with our brains at some point, it would probably still not be possible to have a verification method that there is no double spending going on. I know Neuralink sounds like science fiction, but I doubt our brain would be able to process an entire blockchain in 200 years from now. Then again, who knows what's coming? We won't find out sadly.

But at the end of the day, via satellites bitcoin could be used in the entire universe even as a multi-planetary species. Interesting idea I gotta say!

As long as currency is concerned, it is a norm that some circumstances will play around us that might make one loss access to his funds where it is kept. Carelessness and ignorant can be the curse or the sudden death of the owner of the wallet without him giving out the private keys or bitcoin to a trusted person. This is why one needs to be very careful and make sure that you always check if you can still access your coins and tell a trusted person little on how to access your coins incase you suddenly be in a state that you can no longer access them.

I believe that as time keeps passing on more bitcoin will be lost because of these problems of some investors misplacing their private keys and not having access to their wallet due to some scenarios playing around them.

An exchange could be set up in such a way that the client holds the BTC or it could be set up in a way in regards to the exchange holding the key or some other custodial party holding the key or maybe some combination of key holders, so yeah, keys might not be lost merely by doing something wrong to fuck up your access to your account, so it still depends on who holds the key.. and yeah if you are hacked or socially engineered out of your coins, then those are not lost coins either.. You lost the coins, but they are not lost as far as the blockchain is concerned so long as someone has the keys.. Another thing might be that someone might believe that he lost access to his coins, but he might later discover that he has not lost access to his coins, or maybe he really did lose access to his coins, but someone 200 years later finds his back up seeds, so then those coins were not lost on the blockchain, they were just not accessible for 200 years until someone was able to come across the keys and figure out how to access the coins.  Of course, my hypothetical is totally speculative since bitcoin has only been in existence for 15.5 years, so I guess I am speculating that bitcoin might still exist 200 years from now.

Lost bitcoins are lost forever if the owner used self custodial wallet and once the person lost the seed phrase or missed placed it then the coins can't be recovered but if the person used centralized exchange then I think it is possible to recover the lost bitcoin because I am saying this from my personal experience. It was about two months I lost my coins in exchange and I chatted them up and we discussed for about one month plus and di coins were finally refunded to my exchange address. Most investors in the first generation lost their seed phrase and that becomes a lesson to the second generation of investors.

Verifying who supposedly owned the coins at one time is similar to the problem of figuring out if the coins are actually lost.. Maybe in the replacement of the lost coins with new ones, then the solution would be to make sure that the coins are actually lost by making the claimed lost coins unspendable, but then if they were not actually lost coins, then that would be taking the coins from one person and giving them to another person... the supposed lost coins, could also go back into the bitcoin system as generally issued coins rather than as coins assigned to a specific person, but then we still get back to the whole issue about why do we need the coins to be replaced in the first place, especially since bitcoin still works whether there are 21 million coins or only 21 coins... just that each of the satoshis is more valuable the fewer coins that are accessible... 21 million coins is 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, but 21 coins is ONLY 2.1 billion satoshis.

There could be a lot of reasons beyond merely regular bitcoin usage and the sloppiness of people, including potentially that many folks are not going to be very good at handing down their coins to their heirs that result in the loss of more and more BTC.. so I am guessing that maybe just by regular losses (and no catastrophic events that could increase the quantity of lost coins), there are good chances that we are ONLY going to end up with around half of the coins of the planned 21 million coins in the next 10 -20 years (so 10-11 million coins)..... I may well have already mentioned (and others know this as well) that we likely already have a lot of folks who do not have access to their coins, but they just don't know that they don't have access... Go to access your coins, and you are either not able to and/or you are not able to figure out either where your coins are or how to get to them with whatever complicated security system that you set up or whatever secret places that you hid your keys that was so good of a place to hide that you don't even remember how to get your coins (or your keys).

It's not possible to compensate the ones who have lost their Bitcoins. First of all, it doesn't make any sense to add more Bitcoins to the supply just because some people lost their keys and hence lost their assets, secondly, how the hell would one be able to identify the people who owned those wallets? No one would be able to prove it since they don't have access to the wallets. I could say a certain wallet with a bunch of bitcoins that are lost is mine, no one can say it isn't and I can't prove it as well.

So, things are okay as they are, we don't need more Bitcoins added in the total supply and we don't need to compensate anyone. Those who lost their Bitcoins have lost them for good, and they should start from scratch now if they want to own some Bitcoin again.

Nope. Those coins are lost and gone forever.

The best way to get people to account for the loss would be to fork the bitcoin code and convince some nodes that they hard cap of 21 million bitcoin should be increased and that would be the "compensation" for those lost coins.

To be clear, there's no way in hell to make that happen without a hard fork because none of us node runners are going to increase the hard cap limit ...ever.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the lost Bitcoin is lost forever. No one can or will increase the number of coins, as it would undermine the entire concept.

Well, it might risk it if it was possible. But lost BTC can't be recovered.

Compensating lost BTC risks altering Bitcoin's finite supply, potentially undermining its principles and causing controversy.

Humans are very emotional and human emotions are always most focused on the present which is why you will focus on what is most profitable for you in the present. In the same way people mined bitcoins or bought bitcoins for fun in 2009-10 but they couldn't have predicted that it would be so valuable in the future. And that's why they didn't take care of their wallet keys and they lost their bitcoins. And those who don't have a wallet have no chance to access the bitcoins.  Those bitcoins are now Velunes. they can only be viewed but not used or enjoyed