How Much Bitcoin Is Lost? A lot?!

20% of all Bitcoin mined to date has been misplaced, according to the Wall Street Journal, and it's improbable it will ever be returned to circulation.

In raw numbers, that's 3.6 million Bitcoin lost out of the 19,6 million in the wild, worth around 188.138.772.000$ at the current market value (article updated at 2024).

Since Bitcoin is decentralized, there's no mediator that can be called upon to recover a balance when it's lost, with the most common cause being a Cold Wallet being lost or a misplaced Private Key for a Hot Wallet.

When this happens, if there's no user-made backup of the Bitcoin Wallet, the Bitcoin is deemed unrecoverable and is therefore lost.

Interestingly, some people believe that about 60% of all lost Bitcoins are not actually missing, but are held by bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, who last interacted with them when he launched the BTC coin in 2009.

This is a fair assumption, but without evidence, as many critics argue, there is little evidence to believe these claims.

The thing is, we don't know what happened to the 3.6 million Bitcoins that are considered lost - all we know is that they haven't moved in a very long time.

There is a possibility that some of them may return at some point in the future when they find an opportunity to connect to the wallet.

Of course, among these people there is also some percentage of users who have not lost access to their Bitcoins, but are simply waiting for the best rate for themselves - holding.

But it is safe to assume that a significant amount of BTC has been lost and we will never see it again.

Why were the BTCs lost?

There are many reasons why users may have lost access to their Bitcoins.

Here are the most common ones:

• Lost private key
• Lost cold wallet

Lost private key - this means that the user has lost his key from the official BTC wallet. Without it, he will not be able to restore the wallet and withdraw coins.
 

This is the most common reason for losing coins. We have repeatedly said in our articles and videos that it is best to save keys on multiple media (flash drives).

Losing a cold wallet is about the same as losing a private key. The user will also no longer be able to regain access to their BTC.

Are lost Bitcoins found? Reasons for BTC loss?

In fact, between 2021 and 2023 (article updated in 2024), a huge number of coins were moved from what everyone thought were "completely lost-dead" wallets.

For example, on August 12, 2023, 391,305 BTC worth $11.4 billion were moved from a dormant wallet created in March 2016! 

So now it's hard to say how many coins are actually lost and how many are just in HOLD mode! Certainly, if we take the 3.6 million Bitcoins as a basis, it is likely that 70% are already permanently lost coins, as:

• The created wallet with a private key was lost
• A user who created a wallet with coins from 2009-2015 could forget about BTC, considering it a "dead" idea. And lose access to it
• Accidentally throw away a PC (hard disk) with Seed phrase (without betraying the value of BTC coins, especially relevant for those who changed PCs from 2010-2014).
• And many other reasons to lose BTC

Conclusion

In order not to lose access to your assets, save your private keys on multiple carriers, rewrite passwords on all paper carriers.

Be sure to make several copies of paper wallets, and make a trimming for Bitcoin wallet up to 5 GB, that would not face the problem of lack of space on the hard disk and transfer the wallet to a new disk.