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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
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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.
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.
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!
US coins/bills that are lost are simply made again. You can't do that with bitcoin.
Why would you brute force your old key while it's the same difficulty to brute for some address with over 1 billion in them... https://bitinfocharts.com/top-... The law of number makes it impossible for now... even with computer billions time faster, would not solve the issue.
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.
Go one better, and make your economy run off of polished spheres of metallic plutonium. The consequences of hoarding wealth in such a system are left as an exercise for the reader. Idea shamelessly stolen from Charles Stross.
Which is precisely the point of using money. Money should be a measure and facilitator of economic value and activity, not a finite resource that is intrinsically deflationary. (The historical lessons of gold and silver as deflationary currencies are completely lost on the cryptocurrency crowd.)
If I write a check for $1000 and give it to someone, and he accidentally destroys the check before cashing it, that $1000 is not "gone". The check had no intrinsic value to begin with. It was just a way to transfer value from me to him. All I need to do is write him another check. But once a BTC is lost, it is gone forever. The Bitcoin ecosystem has become a bizarro world where it makes economic sense for someone to find a way to sabotage your wallet and destroy your keys, as it makes the value of his own BTC that much greater (a la "Goldfinger" in the James Bond movie).
The use of BTC as "money" has all but disappeared. Average transactions fees are currently above $5 USD. What is left is a speculative frenzy that is going to pop very dramatically. Sure, you might make some money as a speculator right now, but a lot of people will be left holding the bag when BTC crashes.
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.
At some point national governments will start issuing their own currency in blockchain form. They will define the parameters, and will do the mining, and issue the BitDollars (or whatever) and the value at issuance will accrue to the Treasury as seigniorage. New issues will be made as needed to maintain a stable currency. This is the real future of cryptocurrency as actual currency, and not a finite pool of speculative assets.
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Burn them, or shred them in a cross-cut shredder. Ask Uncle Sam to go make them again for you
They will, as long as the damage still allows them to verify them:
https://www.wikihow.com/Get-Da...
But I wasn't necessarily talking about the Mint replacing someone's individual coins or bills. What the Fed does is measure inflation. When money disappears from circulation, the inflation rate is reduced, and that causes the Fed to lower interest rates, which causes new money to be created.
At some point national governments will start issuing their own currency in blockchain form. They will define the parameters, and will do the mining
What's the purpose of a blockchain then ? If there's one centralized trusted party, you might as well keep everything in a simple database.
If they do not get them back, it is pure profit.
The profit is the replacement.
US coins/bills that are lost are simply made again. You can't do that with bitcoin.
Well there's no process to declare any particular coin/bill as lost and re-issue it, it's more like with gift cards. We can print a thousand IOUs and less than a thousand will ever be redeemed. Personally I hate that practice because it's like giving money, only really inconvenient money where you can pick anything in the store so it's not personal at all but not in that other store that sells it for less or of some other type you like better or something else entirely and it expires. Been there, done that because I didn't have anything I'd like to spend it on right then and there and when I did want/need to buy something I didn't remember I had the damn card. I guess the government is the same, a little extra "free money" they can print.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
should be safe
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The US Mint does the same thing and part of the reason that the United States has had commemorative quarters since the 1990's is the seigniorage. In fact that seigniorage is one of the avenues of revenue, although not as much as taxes are.
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. . . .
The profit is the replacement.
Not quite. The seigniorage is the profit that the government derives from minting money below face value, or if the currency is withdrawn from circulation (ex., by collectors). If the a $100 note is destroyed and replaced by another one then there is no net impact. However, if the note goes into international circulation then it is very profitable since tangible goods and services were exchanged for the note and it likely doesn't return to domestic circulation.
Honest question. Would you be able to cash in this amount in bitcoin? If so, who would do that?
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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!
The profit is the exact amount that was removed from circulation. By spending that profit, the government reintroduces it in circulation. In other words, the lost money is restored.
... 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.
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Who got it from Larry Niven
Those who open their minds too far often let their brains fall out.
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.
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foreach webpage in Internet /bitcoin/
if
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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.
So Darwin is right already at lower levels of "rich"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Money that literally KILLS you might be a bit of a hard sell, ya know...
But Bitcoins are great in this regard. People think they're anonymous, people think that they're "forever", people like it for being the "next big thing", and most of all they'll soon find out that of course they can stuff their bitcoins into their mattresses but that this is dangerous, and that stuffing them into "banks" can be at least as dangerous, and you'll start to see people wanting to get rid of it.
I think we'll see a test case for Gresham's Law very soon here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fire isn't as easy to verify, but let's say a toddler got into your wallet and put some $100's in your cross-cut shredder. You can send the contents of the shredder to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving for mutilated currency redemption. Their forensic experts will sift through the cuttings and identify every bill little Timmy fed the shredder. Here's a full detail of the mutilated currency redemption: https://www.moneyfactory.gov/s... Documenting the fate of every bill printed is as important as replacing it for the person that lost it.
More specifically the bureau of printing and engraving handles redeeming mutilated currency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...