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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
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.
There was a BBC article a few years ago about a man trolling though his local rubbish dump looking for a HDD with bitcoins on:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-w...
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Yeah, I had five at one point. Totally forgot about it because it was worth squat. But who are we kidding, I totally would have sold when it hit $10 each anyway for a free $50. This way I at least get to dream of that $50,000 I could've had.
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!
Back in the beginning when you could do that on your home PC in a reasonable period of time.
If you did it back in the beginning, you would have mined multiples of 50 coins.
US coins/bills that are lost are simply made again. You can't do that with bitcoin.
> 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
Bitcoin is like lupus; it looks different every time it's promoted.
Indeed, it was not so long ago (even in Internet time) that proponents were claiming you could use Bitcoin alone to get by in the world.
>It's a good idea if you mostly use it for storing your wealth
Sticking with the specific case of Bitcoin, and not the general case you appear to be making, no, no it is not. Mostly because Bitcoin has no value beyond speculation, and the hype train could derail at any moment. If you board and disembark from the train at the right time, you could get rich... but every speculation bubble in history has had more people lose than win trying to time that.
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.
Ahh, so you weren't making a general case and you're a Bitcoin lunatic.
Noted.
That's the reality for most of the early miners: they probably all cashed out early-ish. There's a few stories of people hanging on to them longer for whatever reason, like that student who lost the password for his wallet, and finally found it when his stash was worth €300k or so. He bought an apartment with it, and good for him... but that same stash would be in the low 8 figures today.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
We're not mining any new van Gogh paintings, and they are still pretty valuable.
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.
>Think when the bubble pops it's all going away? Or do you think it will return to a baseline value and stabilize?
It's difficult to tell. It seems there's an unending stream of new kids finding this 'amazing new technology' and jumping in enthusiastically but uncritically - and a portion of those never get past the enthusiasm stage.
Then there's the 'get rich quick' people, who understand nothing at all about the system but can parrot talking points... they're the ones who would most likely move on to the next scheme when Bitcoin crashes in value.
Still... I'm not so sure there won't be a significant number of computers running full Bitcoin nodes and continuing the original blockchain for a long, long time, if only for some obscure geek cred. And those remaining users could still use it as currency.
A small enough group of users doing that and it'd probably have whatever (likely insignificant) value they assign to it at the moment, essentially rendering it even less stable than it is now. You know, "Hey, Joe... can I have a slice of pizza for a bitcoin???"
There is a laptop lost in a UK garbage dump with 7,500 BTC on it. Never getting those back...
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!
If you did it back in the beginning, you would have mined multiples of 50 coins.
Man, no reason to make me more depressed!
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)...
Well, I could sell you one Dogecoin for one Bitcoin. They're not the same, but it's a pretty good replica since they're both crypto-currencies based on blockchain technologies.
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