20% of all issued BTC are lost forever

Bitcoin emission is limited to 21 million, which means that there will never be more than 21 million BTC in circulation.

Thanks to the controlled proposal mechanismbitcoin, at the moment, only about 18.5 million coins have been issued (or 88.1% of the maximum number). However, since a significant amount of Bitcoin has been lost beyond recovery, the actual BTC supply available for use or trading is lower than stated.

In terms of numbers, for five years, a fifth of the Bitcoin supply has not moved anywhere, and this can be explained by three main reasons.

It is believed that in the first months of existenceCryptocurrency mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto mined about 1.1 million BTC. Since then, Satoshi, apparently, has not touched his "cache", which indicates that he or she (they?) Cannot or will not transfer these assets into circulation.

Given these facts, people agree that since Satoshi's bitcoins are out of circulation, the available supply has already decreased by about 5.9%.

In addition, the withdrawal of Bitcoin from circulation canbe the result of ordinary loss. Due to the fact that owners of bitcoins need a private key or words to restore access to transfer cryptocurrency, anyone who loses them will also lose the opportunity to spend their funds.

In most cases, this happens with smallamounts, although history knows several examples when people lost thousands of bitcoins. Such an incident happened to one Briton who threw out a hard drive with 7,500 BTC.

Also, some bitcoins belong to the deceased.owners of cryptocurrencies who, fearing theft, kept them until the very last days. When the 30-year-old founder of the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX died, he "took" with him private keys to various cryptocurrencies, including about 1,000 BTC, worth about $ 190 million.

It is difficult to say exactly how many bitcoins were lost due to negligence or simply unfortunate coincidence of circumstances, but this is at least tens of thousands of BTC.

In the same category, we will include sending to incorrect addresses, when users manually entered the address of the bitcoin wallet and confused both a combination of letters and numbers, and registers.

• If we take a less scrupulous approach and consider any Bitcoin that has not moved in more than five years as lost, then about 20% of the total cryptocurrency supply falls into this category.
• According to a recent report from an analytics companyChainalysis, about 3.7 million BTC have not been moved for at least five years - that's about $40.6 billion that may never be moved again.

Also, most of the Bitcoin supply wasdeliberately sent to "incineration addresses". Essentially, these are useless bitcoin addresses with an unknown private key, which means that any bitcoins sent to that address are likely to disappear forever.

During all this time for various purposesA large number of similar “burn addresses” were used, including the 1CounterParty address, which was used as part of the Counterparty 2014 Proof-of-Burn event. So far, over 2,700 BTC have been sent to over 100 addresses likely destined for burning. As a result, about $30 million worth of bitcoins were withdrawn from circulation.

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