According to research firm Glassnode, roughly one in ten Bitcoins has not moved for 10 years or more.
The platform data shows that as of December 17, 1,857,721 Bitcoins have not moved in over 10 years. With a total supply of about 18,57З,268 coins in circulation (and this number grows every 9-10 minutes as miners calculate new blocks), this represents approximately 10% of all BTC mined to date.
While some Bitcoin maximalists may see this as a sign of true commitment to the first cryptocurrency, things are less romantic. Probably, most of these coins have long been lost for various reasons, so no one will ever be able to sell or use them.
In the first place, the mysterious creator of the first cryptocurrency, Satoshi Nakamoto, has mined about 1.125 million Bitcoins (according to various estimates) that have not been transferred in over a decade. Since no one knows where he or she or they may be today, the fate of these coins is uncertain at best.
If we exclude Nakamoto’s Bitcoin stocks from the equation, another 2.7 million Bitcoins are probably also lost forever. As possible reasons, one should take into account the lost private keys, failed hard drives, the death of their owners, who did not have time to pass on their wallet balances.
Overall, at least З.8 million Bitcoins, or roughly 20% of all mined coins by this time, most likely cannot be recovered. At current prices, $85.З billion in BTC has sunk into oblivion.
