One of these days ... someone will hit the JACKPOT!

For another thread, it might be cool to try and calculate the biggest JACKPOT someone is likely to hit over the next ten years.

Cheers,
Adam    

Nope, stolen coins are still in circulation.

Awww...  I thought it was rather interesting myself...

So, for SCIENCE (er, well, wallet code testing), I modified a bitcoin client to short-circuit IsMine, IsConfirmed, and the coinbase maturity check. Then I rescaned the blockchain:

    "balance" : 6848199.98999999,
    "blocks" : 136965,

50*136965 - 6848199.98999999 = 50.01000001

This isn't the same as lost coins— e.g. my client thinks it can spend the 1BitcoinEater coins. This is a count of coins that don't exist, at least as far as the wallet code is concerned.

The 1e-8 is the coin midnightmagic opted not to generate in tribute to Satoshi. The 0.01 is the fee midnightmagic accidentally destroyed in the process. (http://blockexplorer.com/block/0000000000004c78956f8643262f3622acf22486b120421f893c0553702ba7b5)

I'm _assuming_ the 50 is the duplicate coinbase from http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000a4d0a398161ffc163c503763b1f4360639393e0e4c8e300e0caec.

These coins aren't even recoverable with a magical ECC cracking and/or hash colliding machine, but at least as far as the wallet code is concerned they're the only ones.

I wonder if Bitomat will be adding their 17,000BTC to this list?

They didn't state any amount of bitcoins being lost --> 17000BTC is the price if you want to buy the page there

Yeah, I know it's an old thread, but wanted to update it with the latest.

So, 2600+ confirmed coins lost by MtGox.

18910.26110001
+2600
21510.26110001

Found this on the bitomat situation.  I'll go ahead and add those coins for now.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/j4t58/3rd_largest_bitcoin_exchange_has_lost_its/

21510.26110001
17000.00000000
38510.26110001

Only 20,961,490 coins left.  Better start buying!

I'd say that's legitimate as lost coins.  Not sure how you'd go about finding similar lost coins though.

38510.26110001
+     0.00224733
38510.26334734

Ok...

38510.26334734
+    2.50000000
38512.76334734

Bitcoin's been going for what, 3 years now?  But really only used heavily for 2.  So you can assume around 19k lost coins per year, so far...

Of course, there will never be "no more bitcoins".  Losses are more likely to be expressed as a percentage of remaining coins, which would never reach 0.  19k out of 7M coins is about 0.27%.  So a quarter of a percent of remaining coins per year.  Who knows how that might change if Bitcoin becomes mainstream.  On the one hand, more people touching coins = more lost coins.  On the other hand, more people touching coins = more value per coin = fewer coins per person being touched.  It might just even itself out.