How many ETH are there? How many USD are there?
No one knows.
How many BTC are there? Precisely 19,357,549.46, with another 1,642,451 left to be mined by the year 2140.
Choose wisely… #Bitcoin
Discussion
Technically we don't know how many are lost
No such thing - only unspendable coins. Very few coins are verifiably unspendable so it’s best to assume the entire current supply is available imo
Semantics
Not the second part. You asked how many Bitcoin are lost, I said essentially none. The only things that are important are what you are able to verify for yourself.
Can't verify how many are unspendable
Exactly. So why would we assume any of them are?
Your circular argument doesn't convince me. If unspendable, they don't exist
Right. But what I’m arguing is that there’s no way to know if they can be spent or not, so we shouldn’t assume any Bitcoin are “unspendable”.
I could give you an address and tell you I lost my private key and have you mark my coins unspendable, but I could still have my key and move them 20 years later. Even in cases where it seems very legitimate that Bitcoin have been lost, since there is no way to verify for certain that they are, they effectively aren’t. And they shouldn’t be treated as much when we are calculating total supply.
That argument also assumes that they none are lost. Which is not true either.
I think we have hit a paradox of quantum superposition. Aka schroedinger's cat
Schrödinger’s Bitcoin 🤣
I agree with you that the number which have private keys that have been destroyed is greater than zero. I just don’t see any reasonable way to verify that number, and so I choose to assume all Bitcoins are spendable
I guess that's fair knowing I can't put any kind of number on "lost key coins"
There can always be a hard fork once there isn't enough usable coins left.
Hard forks and #Bitcoin do not go together
If the loss never stops then the 21million coin cap has a large chance of turning into bitcoins biggest weakness in the far future.
I'd say at least ~90% went lost in boating accidents
