Bitcoin’s rise brings back R$36 billion in currencies considered lost

Bitcoins that were considered lost moved again after being out of circulation for a long time. Since Bitcoin reached new price records at least $7 billion in digital currency has returned to the market, the amount is worth approximately $36.3 billion in the current conversion.

According to a report published by Glassnode, in the last 8 months alone more than 59,000 Bitcoins that were identified as lost or stored have returned to the market.

This means, in theory, that the holders would decide that it is time to sell the currencies that appreciated more than 300% in 2020 alone.

„Lost or stored Bitcoins reached a minimum of 8 months: from 7,252,161,786 BTC to 7,252,221,072 BTC in 8 months:“

Several stories about lost bitcoins are not new, many people lost their digital currency simply after a computer crashed and years ago this was not a problem, as the currency could be worth a few cents.

However, those „50 bitcoins“ that were worth nothing and were lost in 2010 today are worth almost R$ 8 million. That is, many people today are trying to recover old HDs or any other device that was used to store the bitcoins.

20% bitcoins lost forever
Current estimates believe that at least 20% of the total supply of bitcoins is lost forever. This means that 1/5 of the maximum supply of digital currency never reaches the market. That’s 4,200,000 BTC (4.2 million).

In other words, the scarcity of digital currency is even greater than many imagine and demand is only increasing. Therefore, the total supply of bitcoins today is approximately 16 million BTC, with many currencies not yet mined and several others still likely to be lost.

Although it is not possible to know for sure how many bitcoins are actually lost and how many are just kept, a report by Coinmetrics reveals that at least 1.5 million can be considered lost indeed.

The report classifies bitcoins as „proven lost“ because they are coins created in the first year of the Bitcoin. The report notes that the genesis block of Bitcoin – the first block in the network – includes a „production“ of Bitcoins. These coins are not currently in circulation.

In addition, there are transactions that were doubled in 2012. As „impossible“ as this may seem, this has happened. New transactions have replaced the previous ones and the duplicates have not been counted.

There are also unclaimed reward currencies. The miners receive rewards for each mined block – and the network authenticates the payments to ensure that the miners do not accept more than enough. However, the network does not check whether the miners are getting less and, for this reason, several bitcoins have been lost.

There are also coins classified as „supposedly lost“, or „zombie“ coins, which are bitcoins that are not 100% lost, but cannot be recovered. This is because the owners of these coins have lost their passwords, which means that the coins are lost, but one day the owner may remember the password, or get the password some other way.

Believe that about 1,496,907 bitcoins are lost that way.

It is important to remember, therefore, that several Bitcoin price expectations based on its supposed supply of 21 million units is optimistic, in fact there are fewer coins and probably others will be lost.

Some will reappear, as is happening, but you can see that the quantity is relatively small.