People lose things all the time like wallets, car keys ever their parking spots. But what about losing something digital, like cryptocurrency? Since bitcoin doesn’t exist in a physical form you can’t drop it or leave it behind. But you can still lose it in form of forgetting your passwords or private keys, sending or getting it delivered to the wrong address, losing their devices and etc.
Let's look at how much worth of bitcoin is lost and more about lost bitcoins.
I was first surprised when I heard that 20% of the existing bitcoin is either lost or stranded in digital wallets which are worth around $140B.
The total available bitcoin is capped at 21million with new coins being mined every now and then. It is expected that well reach the cap on or before 2140.
If you lose a local currency it won't bother the government/economy on a large scale, because the government simply prints new money on regular basis.
But the supply of bitcoin is not like that it’s finite so when someone loses a bitcoin the circulating supply decreases.
Security Key
A private key is needed to access bitcoin and anyone who has a Google Doc with all their passwords knows a key or a password is very easy to be misplaced.
A very good example is a kid from Germany who has a hard disk with $220m of bitcoins in it. Unfortunately, he forgot the password to the drive, which is programmed to lock itself after 10 failed attempts. The dude only has 2 attempts left to unlock the drive or it gets lost forever.
If you think that kids are irresponsible, ever heard of James Howells who threw away a hard disk that contained 7500 bitcoins which he mined at literally no cost in the early days. That could be worth more than $300m.
Yep, it is possible to mine bitcoins and then forget that you ever owned it. In the early days when the bitcoin craze started, it was easy for anyone to mine bitcoin in their work laptop and it literally costed nothing, many people thought these coins may never have a value, let's play this game during our free time, for many mining was more of a hobby so many just forgot about it.
Is there a way to find lost bitcoins?
Well, it depends on how you lost it. People have begun to offer help in finding lost bitcoins which include data recovery and even hypnotists and you pay them with the coins that are found. But it is never a guaranteed way.
If you’ve ever lost or know anyone who’ve lost bitcoins and somehow managed to retrieve it? let me know.
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