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> It's people who leave their money on crypto exchanges that lose their coins.

People who hold their own coins lose them as well. It was estimated that 3.7 million bitcoin have been already lost irreversibly [1]. That's a staggering number. It's roughly 20% of the entire supply.

[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/bitcoin-market-data-exc...

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They equate “lost” with “not moved in 5 years”. That’s a strangely short cut off — I would use 10 years instead. It’s completely possible for coins to sit around for 5 years in cold storage addresses without being touched.

It's funny because just this week I moved some BTC from a wallet I hadn't touched since 2013. And I used it to pay for something pretty mundane. In retrospective, the idea of someone whipping their "10 year old wallet" just to pay for something trivial is a bit amusing to me.

Be careful with statements like this to not dox yourself too much

Meh. I'm sure there's a lot of transactions like that.

Yeah but some of my own coins are considered to be 'irreversibly lost', simply because I haven't touched them in five years.

I don't see why I should take this seriously.

It's an estimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimation

There comes a point where an estimate turns into a guess though. I would argue they are way past that point.

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