Pretty early on I had a hard drive crash and took with it my Bitcoin wallet.  I had my private keys backed up of course but I still had some learning to do about change addresses.  I still have no idea how much BTC is sitting in that wallet in change addresses that I was unable to recover and I also am aware of an address that had at least 0.4 BTC on it that wasn't backed up at the time of the crash, so at the very least I have a dead hard drive with 0.4 BTC on it.  Maybe someday it will be enough to have someone try and recover it and maybe they'll find me a lost stash of who knows how much BTC in change addresses.  I'm certain there's some and possibly as much as 50 BTC, but I don't trust any technician enough to hand over my hard drive and compromise my keys.  Someday...

Humans are very emotional and human emotions are always most focused on the present which is why you will focus on what is most profitable for you in the present. In the same way people mined bitcoins or bought bitcoins for fun in 2009-10 but they couldn't have predicted that it would be so valuable in the future. And that's why they didn't take care of their wallet keys and they lost their bitcoins. And those who don't have a wallet have no chance to access the bitcoins.  Those bitcoins are now Velunes. they can only be viewed but not used or enjoyed

Well, it might risk it if it was possible. But lost BTC can't be recovered.

Nope. Those coins are lost and gone forever.

The best way to get people to account for the loss would be to fork the bitcoin code and convince some nodes that they hard cap of 21 million bitcoin should be increased and that would be the "compensation" for those lost coins.

To be clear, there's no way in hell to make that happen without a hard fork because none of us node runners are going to increase the hard cap limit ...ever.

Verifying who supposedly owned the coins at one time is similar to the problem of figuring out if the coins are actually lost.. Maybe in the replacement of the lost coins with new ones, then the solution would be to make sure that the coins are actually lost by making the claimed lost coins unspendable, but then if they were not actually lost coins, then that would be taking the coins from one person and giving them to another person... the supposed lost coins, could also go back into the bitcoin system as generally issued coins rather than as coins assigned to a specific person, but then we still get back to the whole issue about why do we need the coins to be replaced in the first place, especially since bitcoin still works whether there are 21 million coins or only 21 coins... just that each of the satoshis is more valuable the fewer coins that are accessible... 21 million coins is 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, but 21 coins is ONLY 2.1 billion satoshis.

There could be a lot of reasons beyond merely regular bitcoin usage and the sloppiness of people, including potentially that many folks are not going to be very good at handing down their coins to their heirs that result in the loss of more and more BTC.. so I am guessing that maybe just by regular losses (and no catastrophic events that could increase the quantity of lost coins), there are good chances that we are ONLY going to end up with around half of the coins of the planned 21 million coins in the next 10 -20 years (so 10-11 million coins)..... I may well have already mentioned (and others know this as well) that we likely already have a lot of folks who do not have access to their coins, but they just don't know that they don't have access... Go to access your coins, and you are either not able to and/or you are not able to figure out either where your coins are or how to get to them with whatever complicated security system that you set up or whatever secret places that you hid your keys that was so good of a place to hide that you don't even remember how to get your coins (or your keys).

An exchange could be set up in such a way that the client holds the BTC or it could be set up in a way in regards to the exchange holding the key or some other custodial party holding the key or maybe some combination of key holders, so yeah, keys might not be lost merely by doing something wrong to fuck up your access to your account, so it still depends on who holds the key.. and yeah if you are hacked or socially engineered out of your coins, then those are not lost coins either.. You lost the coins, but they are not lost as far as the blockchain is concerned so long as someone has the keys.. Another thing might be that someone might believe that he lost access to his coins, but he might later discover that he has not lost access to his coins, or maybe he really did lose access to his coins, but someone 200 years later finds his back up seeds, so then those coins were not lost on the blockchain, they were just not accessible for 200 years until someone was able to come across the keys and figure out how to access the coins.  Of course, my hypothetical is totally speculative since bitcoin has only been in existence for 15.5 years, so I guess I am speculating that bitcoin might still exist 200 years from now.

@Agbe how did you "lose" coins on a centralized exchange that needed to be refunded? Have you been hacked? Or why would the centralized exchange have to refund lost coins? If it was the access to your account, it all comes down to whether or not it was an exchange you have provided KYC to or whether you can prove the identity tied to the email address you used to sign up at the exchange. I am bit confused because losing coins that have to be refunded on an exchange is usually a case when the exchange is to blame for a hack. Otherwise it makes little sense.

As for a lost back up seeds, I think it is relatively hypothetical that someone finds it after 200 years when the initial owner probably did everything to detect them, or accidentally destroyed them. But I do think that the bitcoin blockchain is an architecture that has a very good chance to survive for a very, very long time. Because after all, what other architecture that is publicly verifiable for everyone, free from SPOFs and resolves the Byzantine Generals problem?

When companies like Neuralink are successful and we all control everything with our brains at some point, it would probably still not be possible to have a verification method that there is no double spending going on. I know Neuralink sounds like science fiction, but I doubt our brain would be able to process an entire blockchain in 200 years from now. Then again, who knows what's coming? We won't find out sadly.

But at the end of the day, via satellites bitcoin could be used in the entire universe even as a multi-planetary species. Interesting idea I gotta say!

Here's the thing, there's some way we can retrieve those, but that would be too much trouble legally and technologically, soon as the lost bitcoins are retrieved everyone who lost their coins, and even those who not will speak up about it hoping to get their piece of the pie back. Issues will arise and this will become a problem. I think the system is better off for now not dealing with the lost bitcoins, after all, it's going to take at least a hundred years or so for all bitcoins to be mined so we still have time aplenty to prep things up, and of course, stock up on bitcoins. It's also worth noting that bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency on the market right now, there are literally hundreds of safe choices out there to choose from and you'd still be able to make a bag out of them.

We could think of quite a few different scenarios in which keys might be thought to be lost over a very long period of time, and yeah, maybe the scenarios for recovery 200 years down the road are not as good as a shorter timeline, such as 50 to 100 years.. and a person could have lost his seed, or forgot that he put it on steel in the garden.. and a person down the road comes across the information and realizes that it is a seed phrase.. so then recovers the coins in whatever wallets are then available... or someone might even think that he had destroyed some keys.. but he did not destroy all of the copies... again someone else (in the future or 50, 100, 200 or some other quantity of years) comes across the seed words or whatever form of password (or recovery system that is then being used)... and he figures out how to check them and/or to recover them... sometimes it could be a matter of putting together a puzzle.. to put various parts of the puzzle together in order to see that it is a seed phrase.. and maybe even some of the seed words were written in order and others were written backwards, so there could be some back and forth tries before finally coming across the combination that opens the wallet.



We still don't know what we don't know - which especially pertains to things that might happen in the future...so yeah, right now bitcoin seems as the best thing since sliced bread, but we cannot know if there might be some way in which it might be broken and/or superseded.


I am not going to claim to know a lot of these things, and surely sometimes we might not need to know the specific inventions and/or break-throughs to predict the future, yet sometimes certain kinds of changes, inventions or happenings can greatly change future trajectories.. and perhaps some things (events/happening) could contribute towards changes in either direction in terms of loss of technologies and powers or the gaining of more technologies and powers, but then there can be various strains with social interactions and even the numger of people who might be able to have knowledge in certain fields and to be able to share or to pass down knowledge.. and maybe some kinds of knowledge come from doing things, and if we might not know how certain things are done, then the break down of some of the more sophisticated systems could end up in breakdowns of progress. and maybe having to start over in some technological areas.
 

There still seem to be limitations regarding the ability to move information, so we can have our various imaginations regarding bitcoin in space - while some of the on the earth practicalities seem a lot more concrete - even though we might not be able to rule out various kinds of unexpected advances that could end up changing how we consider if there might actually be real applications that go beyond this particular planet.. so I personally don't spend too much time thinking about those kinds of BIGGER brained ideas that I have difficulties recognizing in terms of what I perceive to be more concrete real world applications.


Your coins were not lost in the same sense that we are using the term in this thread.  Between Kucoin, ByBit and you, there seemed to have been some confusion regarding who had the coins.. so yeah you sent them and the coins were moved, and between the two exchanges they also had to figure out who had the coins, but they were never lost...

Now if one or the other exchange had lost the coins or sent the coins to a burner address or some other way of losing the keys, then the coins had the potential of actually being lost, but in your case they were not lost... just had gone missing (seemingly temporarily) with some potential lack of clarity (at least from you) regarding where the coins/keys were, and perhaps the exchanges knew where the coins were, but there seemed to have had been some automation of their coin processing systems involved and perhaps there were some needs for personal intervention to figure out where the keys (coins) were.. but the mere fact that you did not know or you could not figure out where the coins were, did not necessarily mean that one or the other exchanges did not know where the coins/keys were, even if Kucoin required you to start an investigation (and to pay them $40 USDT) in order to supposedly investigate into the matter.

If I am said not to read what other people have said here, that might be true. But I want to say that there is no increase in the amount of bitcoin to be equal between 21 million Bitcoin and the missing. 21 million is the total amount, if Bitcoin is about 1/4 or more, it is an incorrect owner's fault in maintaining and protecting Bitcoin. Seed phrase or private key is quite important that needs to be maintained and stored properly even though the wallet is deleted. By maintaining well and correctly, then most likely the owner of Bitcoin can get it back.

The amount of bitcoin lost due to no longer able to find or no longer able to remember the seed phrase or because of other factors, from what I know is true.