Bitcoin wallet is decentralized and nobody or any other person has the access to your wallet so if you lost your private key then your coins will lost forever and that is why we advise bitcoin users to always have backup of the private key and split it in different places so in case you misplaced the one that is with you, you can still use the backup to retrieve the wallet back. The amount of bitcoin you lost as of that time was not big as of now. But what really happened that you lost such amount of bitcoin. Probably as of that time you were not serious about the coins if not the whole 10 BTC just lost like that? Op your negligence might had caused this. Sorry.

I'm sorry for your loss; I'm guessing you tried recovering them already to no avail, which is saddening, but you're certainly not the only one.

This matter has been discussed quite a few times in the past. An exact amount of lost Bitcoins can't be determined, but as others have already mentioned, it's said to be approximately 5 to 6 million coins. Of course, this estimate might be way off, but there's no actual way of knowing. The intriguing part of this is that Bitcoin is actually rarer than we've thought it to be due to its actual circulating supply, which is a lot smaller than the current number of approximately 19.5 million coins.

That was a long time ago. By the time you lost Bitcoin, you should immediately find the key to open the wallet. You can check all the places where you usually put your important things. There is a very low chance to found a lost Bitcoin private key if takes a decade before you decide to find it. Most of the time, the things that are visible in your house are not visible in today.
It's a lesson to us that we should keep our private key in a safe place, if possible in multiple places. If ever you can't find it, the chances of finding them increases and you should change your private key after you found it.

Not lost but just lose in trading.

Those lost forever can't be retrieved if there's no longer the private keys from the owners of it. @OP how did you lost that 10 bitcoins of yours?

And that's sad as just this one: The Welshman who accidentally threw out 8,000 Bitcoin in 2013 is mounting an $11 million campaign to get it back

Access to wallets and bitcoins can be changed hands, recovered by some future advanced recovery services or compromised, we don't know about it now. We only assume very long inactive bitcoins have high chances of belong to people who lost access to those wallets and bitcoins.

We only can use HODL waves for estimations which are only estimations and don't represent exact amount of forever lost bitcoins.

We can use 10 years like you suggested, 8 years, 6 years or 5 years, any period that arbitrarily chosen by each person. Not all bitcoins inactive for like last 10 years are lost bitcoins and those coins can be woken up anytime in future.

I had to double check the date but there is a thread EXACTLY like this somewhere on bitcointalk where people discuss how many bitcoins they lost forever and they kept a tally. I am too lazy to search but I remember reading it a few times. Maybe someone here knows what I am talking about and can post it.

As for coins lost? I would say around 2 million or so for sure. Maybe up to 4 million in some cases. The satoshi coins are definitely lost and there is over 1 million or so plus another million or two for people who just lost their private keys.

There's no way to restore access to coins that were truly lost, and it's also next to impossible to assess which coins fall under that category. Estimations usually rely on presuming coins that weren't moved for x years are lost. But it's perfectly reasonable that some may simply have no reason to move the coins over the years while technically being able to do that, so those coins aren't actually lost. Then there are people who lost access to their wallets, but there's a small chance that they or someone else will find access to them at some point by stumbling upon a seed phrase or something. Finally, there are coins that were burned intentionally and those accidentally sent to non-existent addresses, in which cases the coins are truly lost, but keeping track of that isn't easy either.

The only bitcoins that we can classify under lost category is that sent to OP_RETURN command otherwise people who have lost keys or passwords to their wallets may at some point recover those and coins will again be in circulation so we can't call them lost.Although they are lost in the current time and out of circulation but in future we may see supply boosted if they get access to it.

There are many articles claiming around 4M coins are lost but we don't have access to any data that make clarifications on this matter so we just assume they are lost at this time.

Well, as Bitcoin is constructed to be trustless and decentralized, there's no central entity to keep track of "lost" bitcoins. There are provably destroyed coins, those you send to OP_RETURN outputs, miners not claiming the full allowed block subsidy (yes, that happened in the past, unlikely in the future) or spend scripts that can't provably ever be fulfilled.

Then there are "burn addresses" like 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr (213,098,332,861 Sats locked), 1ChancecoinXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXZELUFD (48,019,569,938 Sats locked) and 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE (1,331,866,970 Sats locked), to name a few, where it is almost certain that no entity has the public key and private key. Coins sent to such addresses are taken out of circulation and fill up the UTXO set. They are to be considered lost because no entity will ever obtain the private key for such addresses.

Then with some effort to search in this forum you could've found topics like this one: Let's add up the KNOWN lost bitcoins

You can't really prove what users have listed there but it adds up to some thousands of likely forever lost bitcoins.


I had some really small amount of Sats from a faucet in 2011 that I stacked in a separate Bitcoin-GUI wallet, maybe a few or tens of mBTC, and I'm not sure what happened with those. I thought, I transfered them to my main wallet back then, but couldn't find the incoming transaction in my oldest wallet(s). So, maybe those are lost, unless I dig up that wallet from somewhere deep hidden in my filestore. I've no high hopes, though.