Topic: What about those bitcoins that are LOST? - page 4. (Read 3886 times)

It should hypothetically make the remaining coins more valuable.  But it seems like as long as you can continue the digits past the decimal point (ie 0.00000000000000008879) I think a prefix or scientific notation can be used to show the value.  This may not bee needed for a LONG time, we'll see if btc is still around by that time.

With that said I think the bigger issue is the frustration at losing coins.  I have lost small amounts, and I think I have some "stuck" under the minimum withdrawal amounts from some sites.  This is more of an issue I htink than the coins reducing the number in circulation

Yeah thought that, i did try check it on blockchain but it says not recognised.
I still think i do remember reading about an addresd where you can send coins to and they will be lost or destroyed forever, maybe it was something to do with testing transactions.
I will edit post if i can find anything about this, or if someone else can help.

This is it. You don't know if the coins are truly lost as they are sitting in an address to which someone may or may not have access. Down the road in many years it may lead to more valuable remaining coins.

i think it's a joke man, that address does not exist lol, but i guess someone could customize it with some tools


it will but as a many believe, it will affect bitcoin exactly by the % of the coins that are lost nothing more or less, simple math

so if we lose 33% we might end with a 50% gain, if we lose 50% we might end with 100% gain and so on

Could someone please explain how this address works?
I imagine that it's just a btc address that is guaranteed some how that the private keys have been distroyed, but are the coins still sitting in that wallet/address and could anyone ever hack it to steal the coins?

Suppose the FBI started burning bitcoins. Let's assume they were wildly and unrealistically successful and managed to burn 18.9 million bitcoins (90% of the total supply ever). The result would be that there would "only" be 2.1 million bitcoins. That's only a difference of 1 decimal place, so it's clear that this would be a very unsuccessful way to attack the network.

By the way, I'm sure I've seen this topic discussed on the board before. If someone wanted to read more responses to this concern, they could search the board.

Do you know what circulation means?  If coins are lost, they are immediately out of circulation.  Therefore, there are less of them.  

Since you don't know anything about how anything works, I'll explain it to you:

The supply and the demand determine the price.  Every lost coin decreases the supply, which increases the price.  Every coin in cold storage has the same affect.

So at the moment, the value of your coins is affected by lost coins.



We can only hope that would happen.  If "neutralize" means "make it worth $10,000", then please go ahead.



Do you know what a 2% difference in supply does to the price of pork, or wheat, or corn?  No, of course you don't know.  Hint:  It can change it a lot more than 2%.

Did you know that the price of corn was $7.00 a bushel in 2012, and $3.50 in 2014?  I'll save you the trouble of doing the math: that's half the price.

Just go to an exchange and pay attention.  When one person puts in a big order, it can influence everyone else to change their orders because they're afraid their orders won't get filled.  



Satoshi did the same calculation, and he determined that all the money in the world could be replaced with Bitcoin and a Satoshi could still be worth much less than 1 dollar.  

Of course, he was using the M1 money supply.  I'm sure you know what that is, so I won't explain it.

But I will point out that 1 bitcoin is 100 Million satoshis.  According to my math, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that would make 10 bitcoins approximately 1 Billion satoshis (give or take a few satoshis, of course, it's impossible to be accurate with such big numbers).  And then 10,000 bitcoins would be 1 trillion satoshis.  Are we on the same page so far?

So, if you are correct, and I'm sure you are, then we need 241 trillion dollars...So let's see...10,000 bitcoins is a trillion satoshis...so we need 2,410,000 BTC...and we're going to have about 21,000,000...so if 88% of all bitcoins are lost, then we won't be able to send an amount less than 1 dollar.  Is that about right?  

Hopefully by the time 88% of all bitcoins are lost, someone will make another coin that can be used for smaller transactions.  Kind of a "lite" version of bitcoin, maybe.  Do you think it will happen in time to avoid a global crisis?

Can you tell me where to find information about Bitcoin division?
I follow it since a couple years, never read about that possibility to divide Bitcoins in smaller parts than Satoshis.

I guess it will lost forever. it can't effect bitcoin. We still have enough bitcoins.
           

Indeed we can divide Bitcoin as to where we want.
However, I doubt that the coins lost due to the reasons mentioned above can affect the price of Bitcoin simply because there is no way the other Bitcoiners can know that another lost their wallet (hardware failure) or forgot their password. And even if they have heard about it, there is no way to prove that it is true.
So, unless people intentionally sent coins to 1DontSentHereCoz1tsGone4Ever they cannot prove that they are telling the truth or don't have any backups.

This will not have a bad influence on the overall community. At the moment Bitcoin is devisable to 0.0000001 ... If a shortage of Bitcoins occur, they can just add a few zero's. {Extreme scenario}

Coins are also added daily through mining, for many years to come... and would not run out in our life time. 

Nobody will ever really know, how many coins are lost... I have coins in cold storage, that has been there for years. It's out of circulation, but it's not lost.

Most people would bring these coins back in circulation, before a scenario like this occur... because they would be more valueble anyway.   It's really a non-issue.

I hope I explained it, better than I understand it.    

 

So what? When Bitcoin becomes widely used, that is going to change.
It's normal that at the moment, when Bitcoin is mostly used as an investment asset, there is a huge number of them sitting unused.
I have less than 1 BTC, and you bet it: it's sitting warmly in my wallet.

Bitcoins has not been around since years and years but last year 5,5 million bitcoin was untouched for more than 2 years.

i was talking about the impact that lost coins may have, and it isn't so great as a many think, let's say that 10.5M are lost, this would bring (by logic) the price to x2 at best

there is no other reason why it should go to x100 or whatever crazy value, because we have only lost 50% of total supply

I can propose an even worse scenario: let's say that USA now bans Bitcoins.
FBI could, after taking them from criminals, instead than resell them on the market, just burn and lose the keys to recover them.
We are talking about thousands of BTC wasted in each major operation and a continuous waste in smaller operations.
Actually, this would be possibly the only way to neutralize a cryptocurrency: bleed it to death.

I presented a way to "spot" lost coins: they would be out of use since years and years.

Around one year ago, I made a quick count and found that 21 million BTC, if they would be distributed to cover ALL the Earth wealth (241 trillions), they would be not granular enough to be used as currency.
To say it another way: a single Satoshi would be valued something like 50 or 100 $, and couldn't be used for shopping in a comfortable way.

Now, of course this is an utopian scenario, but it still is a POSSIBLE scenario, and one that we all hope will be one day reached.
Sure there's alternatives out there: Litecoin could come into play as THE alternative for everyday transactions, it also has a much higher cap, it would be the silver of cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin could be the gold.
But still: each Bitcoin or Satoshi lost, in a scenario where all Bitcoins are used, would represent a failure when granularity is not enough.

"Lost" coins are gone forever until/unless the private key is later found.

Hopefully the first time someone loses their private key it is for a small amount of BTC so that they can learn a lesson without a major loss.

Some people have lost a lot (such as throwing away computers by accident before BTC was worth anything) without ever creating a backup.

I think a few major exchanges have lost coins by accidentally wiping keys during server updates

Not like that.
In a possible future that we all are hoping, Bitcoins will be a used everywhere by everyone.
There will actually be scarcity of them.
People won't BUY bitcoins: they will USE them and EARN them with their work (until AI and robotics will take all of that...).

A good question OP i have thought about this before.
Interesting answers so far but 2 questions of my own

1) Who would sign off on the coins actually being lost and would we ever trust any 1 person to do this?
2) I know there is a blockchain.info address that you can send coins to that can never be recovered, do these coins get replaced? Can anyone supply that address for me please?