How many Bitcoins are irretrievably lost and what does that mean? – Mish Talk

by James · September 24, 2022

How many Bitcoins will there be?

The maximum number of Bitcoins is 21 million. But if 30 percent of them are lost, the actual available supply of usable Bitcoins is 21 – (.3 * 21) = 14.7 million.

That estimate is probably in the ballpark. Estimates of lost keys are usually 20 to 30 percent.

That would make the final available supply of 14.7 million to 16.8 million, not 21 million.

How many remain to be mined?

There were 19,124,681 bitcoins in existence in August 2022.

That means approximately 1,875,319 remain to be mined.

What does this mean?

One way of looking at things is that there is less chance of a large wave of whale dumping if 30 percent of the coins are lost.

Another way of looking at things is that a large percentage of Bitcoin holders are underwater.

Current estimates are that about 50 percent of Bitcoins are below the price people paid. I don’t think it takes into account lost Bitcoins. If correct, the percentage of people underwater is much higher than 50 percent.

A decent percentage of those underwater will probably want to sell if they can ever get back to even.

Meanwhile, the number of people who haven’t heard of Bitcoin has dropped to about zero.

In 2012, the amount of people who can eventually become true core believers was much higher than today.

More importantly, the amount of big money buyers is likely to have fallen off the cliff.

Price set at the margin

The price of Bitcoin, like everything else, is set at the margin.

And if the big money believers are already in, a whale selling 100 or even 10 Bitcoins will dwarf thousands of buyers of tiny fractions of Bitcoin.

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OK, there is a large pool of buyers who do not own Bitcoin. So what? I hear the same nonsense about gold. It goes like this: If only X percent of the people who don’t have gold buy gold, the price will go to the moon.