I am confused as to why the bitcoin market cap is published to be (today) about $175 billion. This is calculated by multiplying the current bitcoin price (~$9500) by the number of bitcoins mined (18,406,000). Yet it is believed that approximately 30% of all bitcoins ever mined have been lost. if a private key to a bitcoin address has been lost, then the bitcoin in that address should, in my opinion, be erased from the market cap. It is published in articles that a bitcoin market cap of $1 trillion would equal around $50,000 per bitcoin. This is a substantial underestimation. If you factor in a 30% loss of bitcoin, then a $1 trillion market cap would equal around $77,000 per bitcoin. Losing a private key is like throwing a gold coin in the ocean. It can be argued that the gold coin is still there. But for all intents and purposes, the gold is non-existent, because it would be impossible to recover. The point I'm making in this post is that bitcoin is much rarer than published. There are not 18.4 million bitcoins out there. There are only around 14 million.
The reason why people think that it's lost Bitcoins is :
Apparently that wallet has been inactive for a while, we are not really sure of anything. It is not actually possible to get in touch with anyone to confirm that . Who knows if someone is just holding those coins? Who knows if someone just lost their keys and in the near future they can somehow remember it and recover them ?
At the same time there are people who apparently died and someone else tried to steal their coins *Craig Wright* , there can be cases like that too. When any family member discovers the worth they can very easily try and recover since now there is an option of passing on your Bitcoins to some family member, considering it wasn't so in the previous years , I do think wallet company can confirm and do the same.
