Slashdot Mirror
Nearly 4 Million Bitcoins Lost Forever, New Study Says (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: According to new research from Chainalysis, a digital forensics firm that studies the bitcoin blockchain, 3.79 million bitcoins are already gone for good based on a high estimate -- and 2.78 million based on a low one. Those numbers imply 17% to 23% of existing bitcoins, which are today worth around $9,700 each, are lost. While others have speculated about the number of lost bitcoins, the Chainalysis findings are significant because they rely on a detailed empirical analysis of the blockchain, where all bitcoin transactions are recorded.
How about the vacuum cleaner bag?
N/t
Comment removed based on user account deletion
More like 4 million coins they just assume are lost forever. I'm not sure why everyone assumes Satoshi's original 1 million coins are just lost forever. I'd say he's likely just holding them and playing the long game on it. BTC is still fragile, and if he started cashing them in, people would likely freak out and prices might start plummeting, possibly sending BTC into a death spiral. If one really believes in the long term success of BTC, they'd hold those coins until BTC is a true success, is in use everywhere, and is as ubiquitous as credit cards. Then you can cash them in, people would say "holy shit, those coins WEREN'T lost" but it would have relatively little effect on bitcoin itself.
Likewise with many of the other "out of circulation" coins. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those people are just holding them. I'm sure some of it's lost, but I think 4 million is probably wildly overestimating.
Back in the beginning when you could do that on your home PC in a reasonable period of time.
Then I formatted the computer to restore the OS, and never thought of the wallet.dat.
Oh well.
Those numbers imply 17% to 23% of existing bitcoins, which are today worth around $9,700 each, are lost.
I guess that's one way to drive up the "value" of bitcoins. Fixing the money supply to a finite resource (real or calculated) is by and large not a good idea. Especially one that can be easily lost.
The codes on them got damaged locking people people out of them. I bought one for $60 back in 2013 and now cannot realize my gains.
This is only sort of a problem.
Much like we don't know exactly how much wealth is hiding under someone's mattress (or stored in the form of precious items that could be sold at any time) yet we still manage to find a value for currency that in modern times more or less represents a fraction of GDP... Bitcoin will find a value regardless of how much is lost.
If there's confidence a certain percentage of tokens have become permanently inaccessible, their 'confirmed' loss from the Bitcoin economy will encourage the market to share their perceived value among those tokens still accessible.
It's been a while since I used a Bitcoin client. It used to be that the units were more or less hard coded, so significant inflation or deflation required a client update if you didn't want to deal with large numbers of zeroes. If Bitcoin was actually usable for common purchases that could be a problem.
You know, this makes the whole shit much more appealing. Kinda like the cocoa beans the Aztec used(IIRC, at least one of those cultures around the Mesoamericas), it's perishable wealth. Spend it or watch it rot.
Good. Spend your bitcoins while you can, make the money change hands. That's what drives an economy, people. The less you're able to save, the better.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's beginning to feel a lot like late 2000 again. Those who were around then will remember how much hype there was around technology, and how the various stock market indices were constantly hitting new highs. Profit was the last thing that businesses were thinking about; it was all about growth. Even the most outlandish ideas were taken seriously. The future outlook was nothing but pure optimism.
Then it all came crashing down just a few short months later.
Just look at the outrageous valuations of so many Silicon Valley companies. Look at this cryptocurrency nonsense, where performing a single transaction requires more energy than an average American home uses in a month. Look at the nonsense coming out of moz://a, especially the silly Rust programming language and the terrible Firefox 57 release.
There are a lot of people who will be in for a very rude awakening, and it could very well be happening much sooner than they expect!
Like, I do that all the time, man! If not that, then lighting my blunts. Hm. Maybe that's why I leave them in my pockets. Oh, yeah, totally worthless after wash.
Every time you read "bitcoin", replace it with "tulip" and you'll get a better idea of how this will go down.
I might be totally off base here, but does this matter? How many US coins are lost, recycled or destroyed?
Sent from my TARDIS
Bitcoins are never lost "forever."
They are only lost until it becomes profitable to brute-force private keys.
Don't give up! You have a chance to win up to $200 worth of Bitcoin every hour, for free!
If you want mine your own crypto currency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.
I used to hit the bitcoin fountain when you could jackpot 3-5btc a week. The bitcoin fountains were there to generate interest back when a btc was several dozen to a $US or less. But eventually I got bored with an imaginary Cryptonomicon currency which would never go anywhere. I never invested expecting a bailout in '08 and got burned having predicted the housing crash; I also got bored with BTC never expecting the hedge fund asshats to get excited in a niche geek thing which in any case was more tracked and trackable than cellphones and credit cards.
On several hard disk from the early to mid 2Ks probably in a landfill in the US or Europe between several moves I have what is now worth several 100K-$US in btc, all were free and in the last five years when I finally started looking none were found.
It's a good idea if you mostly use it for storing your wealth, and doing occasional transactions
Bitcoin as a store of wealth? Maybe if you like a HUGE amount of risk on a highly speculative asset.
It's not a good idea if you want to run a national economy on it. I don't think anybody is trying the latter.
Listen to bitcoin advocates sometime. More than a few would like to replace all fiat currencies with bitcoin or something similar. Their arguments are largely unconnected to economic reality but they seem to believe them all the same.
The speculation bubble of gold has been surviving for thousands of years.
Which has a lot to do with why we don't base our money supply on the gold standard anymore.
A totalitarian government that wants to inflict maximum damage to cryptocurrency without firing a shot would just have to work on a worm that would target the users' wallets and make them inaccessible. The number of users that would have gone through the steps to enable recovery would probably be shockingly low.
Over time, the volatility will get less, and the value will stabilize.
That is a statement of faith, not of fact and is unsupported by any evidence that we could likely agree upon.
Right now, the risk is high, but potential rewards are high too.
Yes you can profit from volatility. That however is in direct opposition to the idea that bitcoin is reliable as a store of wealth.
As computer power increases over the years in say twenty years won't it be possible to brute force the passwords on the lost wallets and re take control of the bitcoin?
How is it solved? If there is maximum of 21,000,000 BTC to be issued... and people keep forgetting wallet passwords and loosing storage drives... Then while the amount of issued BTC is limited the amount of BTC accidents is unlimited.
I see it as unsustainable due to human error.
Or can we re-e-print new BTC money?
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
i mined for a while when it first started... along with the seti @home folding stuff.... it was a hobby. after a while and having it running for a year or so... and the coins were all worth a few dollars total.... you stop running it and forget about it and just "lose" them with old hard drives..... how do i know? cuz thats exactly what i did lol
oh well.... looks like i'm going to have to work the rest of my life anyway
There is a laptop lost in a UK garbage dump with 7,500 BTC on it. Never getting those back...
As I said before, "All bits, no coin."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Honest question. Would you be able to cash in this amount in bitcoin? If so, who would do that?
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
While I get your implied meaning the other reason you are correct is because these bitcoins are not lost. At some point it is highly probable that the encryption used will become easily breakable on some future, possible quantum computing, device. At this point the coins can be recovered...although the entire encryption behind bitcoin will also be undermined so they will probably be worthless!
... your mother can't find it. Did you ask your mom where you left your Bitcoins?
At some point in time (with the rapid advance of quantum computing), I suspect it may become feasible to perform a salvage operation on the wallet keys to recover the coin...
Of course "guessing" a 256-bit key is impractical, but I wonder how many of these "lost" coin are protected by mini-private keys that have somewhat weaker than average and might be amenable to a small quantum computer attack.
Also, although I suspect that some of the coin have never been spent, those that have been spent, it might be interesting to forensically attempt to track them and look for potential weaknesses in the generation of the key itself (many random number generators in wide usage have quite a few weaknesses)...
Probably not in a single transaction, but if you look at the "Canadian Bitcoin Index you'll see there's between 500 and 900 Bitcoins worth of transaction every day, for those four exchanges alone.
Let's say 500 Bitcoins with a value of 12K$CAD each, that's 6 million Canadian dollars per day.
Even if you limit yourself to selling one Bitcoin per hour, that's not even 5% of the total daily exchanges happening in the country.
Now imagine exchanges in other countries which have a lot more transactions happening every day, you could probably sell 10 or 20 Bitcoins per hour without making a blip on the overall market.
#DeleteFacebook
I'm not very familiar with it, but it sounds like you can sell fractional coins with pretty high fractional amounts. And that's before we talk about forking or just plain new currencies.
When the gov't decides to crack down it'll be in the tradtionall fashion, they'll arrest a bunch of drug dealers and money launders (and maybe a few ransomware authors) and that'll tank the price. The value of bitcoin is, like it or not, underpinned by illicit goods. Eventually it'll get too big for it's britches and that'll be that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That describes most people's thoughts about money in general.
This reasoning---that other "people" are buying and selling something at some price indicates it's actually worth something---is what causes a bubble. If you understand you're playing hot potato and betting that you're not going to get stuck with it, great. But many of those transaction could easily be a few big miners just pushing the coins around to increase the alleged "volume". Until there's real auditing of many normal, regular people legitimately trading and using the instrument, it's super suspicious.
I wouldn't be surprised if doing that would crash the market.
Wow, you're right...so it would only take you about 6 years to sell your one million bitcoins.
AND...you can stick it to the man because you would have used 10 times more value in electricity to process the transactions than the actual transactions are worth!
What a fantastic currency!
When I say "the man" I mean humanity...take that environment!!
It's not quite as simple as this, as many traders are rapidly sitting on both the sell and buy sides of the market, profiting from volatility but putting little upward or downward pressure on the price.
On the other hand, you can look at market depths such as
http://bitcoinity.org/markets/gdax/USD
and see that, given the current order book, you there are bids for 500 bitcoins right now in the $950-970 range, netting nearly 5M. Of course, who knows how the market would react to a big dump.
If I write a check for $1000 and give it to someone, and he accidentally destroys the check before cashing it... All I need to do is write him another check.
And, to protect yourself from having both checks cashed, you would stop payment on the first check.
Is it possible that the ability to "stop payment" on a lost coin is a feature that could be added to cryptocurrencies in the future?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
This user is a Pedobear Troll. Extremely toxic. Please ignore for your own safety!
$5.00 in electricity to mine them
$5,000,000 in profit in selling them
crashing the Bitcoin bubble.... priceless
...up my nose. If I had my 2015 Bitcoins back, I would be able to afford a much worse drug habit!