15 years ago, 21 million Bitcoins sounded like a huge amount. Today, especially when we have greedy ETFs that buy everything on offer, it all looks much different.
For a long time, not so much attention was paid to the security and storage of BTC, and I know of many stories about lost Bitcoins. Defective hardware, forgotten-lost passwords or private keys etc... I recently read somewhere that around 4 million Bitcoins are considered lost due to similar reasons.
Is there any approximately precise analysis of how many such, forever-locked Bitcoins there are?
At this point, gone are the days when Bitcoin lost is a contribution to everyone as stated by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, but now with the ETF around and accumulating almost every day, it becomes very important to lay attention to what we considered as lost Bitcoin, this quest can lead us into asking a few questions so as for us to get more clarity such question as.
1: what do we consider to be lost Bitcoin?
2: how do we identify lost Bitcoin and in what ways to claim that they are truly lost forever?
The above question may look similar but paying close attention to both will expose a lot of things surrounding that question, because there have been misconceptions that any wallet that is not active for the year is considered lost, or is there a mechanism we can know lost Bitcoin/wallets.