If we were in their shoes many of us won't even have kept us either. From 2009-2013 no one ever believed bitcoin will worth this amount. Even until 2016 many were still doubting despite bitcoin making new highs and maintaining it's volatility. We all safe guard our wallets today not because we are more careful but it's because we now know the worth of bitcoin and it costs us more to acquire them compared to when it all started.



People are prepared ahead of time before taking up inheritances a good investor should have the time to train and prepare his or her successor while they are alive so that they will have value for their assets and continue the trend of accumulating more thus strengthening their generational wealth.

That's true, can really be a scam that the world will never find out.

Yes, it can be a planned death with the conspiracies that were also said before. We can only tell a guess but we'll never find out the real thing, maybe he's really dead or maybe it's a good play that he did and disappeared forever.

Running an exchange before wasn't so tightened and strict. The government doesn't care about it all along as long as it's functional, people just go and register their accounts. But, not just the government and exchanges learned from this mystery but also the users.

This argument does not apply because I demonstrated with an example of backing up data that does not really have direct value, it is more about saving you time from having to do it all again and that time loss has value too. So it is good to have regular backing up discipline of things, they do not need to have direct or high value for that to matter. It is better to not provide excuses or justifications for people who don't back up things. We already have way too many who don't do it and then there are big issues if they lose something. It would be better if everyone backed up all their laptops and phones regularly, but not to the cloud.

The case that you describe happens very rarely in practice, people are not ready for big money simply by reading some stuff. In most cases things turn out bad when there is a large inheritance, and they can turn out bad in all kinds of different ways. One would be if the inheritance is not clear there are often families that collapse completely over small parts of the fortune, brother betrays another brother and all kinds of stuff.. The studies show that it is better not to leave a lot of money to anyone who does not already have that kind of money.

It was worth reading through your entries post. But this part is really the part that caught my attention actually, when dealing with bitcoin one has to take seriously make way and not relying on a single point of failure for accessing fund this could really mean a lot more than every other thing because if that one thing you rely on got lost or ever damaged, access is definitely denied.

Honestly proper backups can never be overemphasised, and once we take all this into consideration we should be with full control over our coins.

"Truly lost bitcoins" are those where there's solid evidence that private key material has been permanently lost. But valid and solid evidence is rarely possible or verifiable. In most cases you have to believe a story someone tells where they claim to have lost access to private keys permanently.

Another case are truly burned bitcoins where there's proof on the blockchain that coins were sent to OP_RETURN or other provably unspendable transaction outputs.


Unfortunately there's likely no evidence that someone still living has possession of required private key material to spend those coins in either case.

If Satoshi is still alive (which I hope for him), I don't believe, he will ever move any of the coins attributed to him. But this assumption is no axiom. I just see no reason for him to spoil his so far excellent privacy. It's his life insurance...


I highly recommend to do some reasonable loss risk assessment and have some mitigation implemented to avoid most relevant loss risks. Self-custody has undeniable responsibilities.

I think Campbell Simpson [1] should be included on the list too. He is an Australian tech journalist. In 2010, he bought 1,400 BTC for just $25. He stored the private key on a text file on a 250GB portable hard drive. He used the portable HDD for storing pirated music and movies, TV series, photos, uni assignments, and his portfolio too, just like regular people.

Based on the story, he seems to have lived together with his girlfriend, and when he broke up with his girlfriend, he moved back home and did a cleanup of a bunch of his tech stuff like cables, PC components, etc., and unfortunately, that portable HDD was one of them. He threw it away.

Source:
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/i-threw-away-48-million-in-bitcoin-20170529-gwf4jz.html

I think threads like this have ultimately been discussed over and over here with the same replies most of all this lost bitcoin tags are wrong, because the coins have been stolen and are in hackers custody doesn’t mean they are actually lost forever, one easy to see that lists like this are actually not correct is even Satoshi holdings are included and we all know that those coins still have chance of coming into the market and as such they shouldn’t be branded lost coins rather should be in the category of dormant addresses.

Just the starting of this month we say the liquid network hack where the hacker actually moved closed to 4,000 bitcoins and in few days read that around 3,400 was returned so if coins in hackers hand can easily be returned like this why list them as a lost forever.

I think the only coins worthy of been tagged lost forever are those burned like Send through OP_Return scripts