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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

Are there good estimates of the amount of bitcoin lost every year due to carelessness? Based on many anecdotes like this, I fear it's pretty large.

Bitcoin was supposed to be slightly inflationary, due to mining. But if a sufficient fraction is lost every year due to hardware failures and forgotten passwords, it will end up being deflationary. Someday (around log(1e6)/log(1+x) years from now, where x is the fraction lost every year), there'll be only 21 bitcoins left in the world, trading either at 0 or a number with 3 or 4 commas.

[edit: fixed in/de-flation mixup]

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First there's no practical way btc can be deflationary given the current interest. The currency pool hasn't kept up with the amount of fiat in the markets at all.

Anyway, second part:

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... is a good list. What you're looking for are wallets with a really early first in and no first out (or not one in a really long time).

#4 is a good one! https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQ... This wallet was last touched in 2011 and has $1,008,433,581.88 in it (yes, ba-ba-billion) Either this is the most disciplined investor ever or it's a lost file.

This person dropped $1,000 in 2010 on a few btc and it's now worth $245million (https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/1PeizMg76Cf96nUQrY...) ... again, that's either super discipline or just a misplaced file.

The untouched wallets are sadly really really common, especially when you get a few pages in ... you see things like this: https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/13DyBwhpDw6152q1dr... ... this person put in $8 (100btc), then $21 (400), then $122 (1700) and that was their july, 2010. Now it's $26.3 million.

Nobody ever believed the fantasy talk in 2010 that 1 btc was going to be worth a dollar, yet alone 12,500! Lots of people were really careless.

I'm there somewhere and have millions of dollars of bitcoins in a lost wallet. Weee, how fun!

Seems morbid but my guess is that they died. Would be a shame, since their family should have it, but it makes the most sense to me.

At least that's how I'd like to think of it, otherwise some poor sod is having to think about this every single day.

Not really! After I realized I had lost my wallet, I just went out and bought more bitcoins. So I predict most of these people that lost that wallet in 2011 don't have a zero balance today.

Layman question: there is no way to brute force access to these accounts?

Yes, maybe, kind of?

With quantum computing it's expected that the ECDSA public-key cryptography used in bitcoin addresses will be broken. However, the ECDSA public key is only exposed when your first transaction out of the address is signed. If you only use addresses once (recommended practice), an attacker would have to break your private key faster than it takes for your transaction to propagate to the entire network in order to steal your coins. It would take a long time between the first cracking of ECDSA to nearly instantly being able to crack it. For example, the first publicly-disclosed attack on SHA1 took 110 GPU-years.

If the accounts listed by the OP have sent transactions in the past and reused addresses (which was common back in 2010/11), it's possible the private keys can be bruteforced in the future.

If not, we don't know the ECDSA public key for the address. Bruteforcing it gets a LOT harder--but never say never.

No, we don't know where the wallets are located physically. I'm not sure it is possible to brute force a wallet even if we did know where it was.

A lot of people track and watch these wallets to see if anything moves, it would cause a lot of panic if these lost coins started moving.

My question is: why isn't someone brute-forcing those lost wallets? I imagine a billion dollars would be worth it.

Because it would theoretically take an insane amount of time? It's cryptographically secure, so unless you have a quantum computer laying around for the factorization.... Might have to wait a little bit for the brute force to complete

This would make bitcoin even more deflationary. Inflation is when a currency loses value. Less and less of something would mean it would gain value creating deflation.

What recourse is there for bitcoin provider services that screw up?

Ie, if one day Coinbase says something like, "sorry, we lost the password to one of our internal coin wallets due to technical error, and your 5.1 bitcoins are lost."

I bet there's some clause in their terms that tries to shield them from this, but wonder how enforceable it would be.

Ie, a regular bank presumably couldn't just say, "sorry we lost your $50k deposit due to technical error". They'd be liable.

Well banks in the US are FDIC insured.

So are your dollars stored on Coinbase.

Well Coinbase isn't a bank and isn't regulated as such, while a bank is... well, a bank. That's the difference. Coinbase is much closer to some bro running a SaaS off AWS than it is any sort of financial institution.

Coinbase's USD wallet is FDIC insured, so it's much closer to a bank in that denomination.

One could argue that the universe of avail bitcoins (those with known passwords) will asymptotically approach zero.

Ie, there's a small chance of a user screwing up. And since there's no recourse, always a perpetual small chance of someone losing their bitcoins.

Maybe Poissonian?

It would be a trivial fork to increase the amount that each bitcoin can be subdivided by, so if the currency does inflate a lot, liquidity can still be maintained.

Is there such a thing as a trivial fork in the bitcoin world? You'd have to get buy-in for most of the developers, and most of the users too, or risk splitting into two currencies. Again.

>was supposed to be slightly deflationary >it will end up being inflationary

I think you got your terms mixed up.

Anecdotally, I know of a ex co-worker who CPU mined a few 50BTC blocks in 2010 and then misplaced the hard drive around 2012.

He is not alone in this.

Sorry, but I genuinely want to know how you can misplace a hard drive!

(Sounds like he went to a good party, the night was long and when he finally got back home he realized he didn't have his hard drive on him anymore.)

You seriously can't imagine this or are you just being snarky? Happens to me all the time. Swap out hard drive to upgrade, throw old drive in box with other hardware junk, throw out junk box months later or when moving to new apartment or simply forget which old box you put that old hard drive in or even which old hard drive had those files etc. Even easier with usb hard drives or external drives.

Seriously, I lose stuff occasionally but nothing as bulky and "expensive" as a HDD. I got a box where I put all computer hardware and I think I just "mentally track" items that cost more than say 50$ and that I walk around with, so I just check for them like I check for my keys or mobile when I leave the house.

Now a pen-drive maybe, but that wouldn't be the place to store my wallet anyway.

Back when bitcoin was CPU mineable I had a couple in a wallet. I've lost the key and the wallet id despite being sure I saved them somewhere. I'm sure I'm far from the only one who has done this.

Ah well, 20 grand lost in limbo.

Bitcoin is a ~democracy, and those questions will be answered. Buying bitcoin is a lot like buying a USA backed dollar, it's an investment in the community. Its not an investment in the physical paper bills/bits.

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