Lost Bitcoin: How Much Is Really Gone?

How much lost bitcoin is there? Nobody knows exactly, because on the blockchain a lost coin looks exactly like one somebody has quietly held for years. The best-known estimate comes from Chainalysis in 2020: about 3.7 million bitcoin that had not moved for at least five years. Glassnode arrived at about 3 million at the time. Around 1.1 million of them are attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. A realistic range is 2.5 to 4 million, or 12 to 20% of all the bitcoin there will ever be.

Why nobody knows the exact number

A bitcoin does not burn like a banknote. It stays on the blockchain at its address, visible forever. What is lost is the private key that could spend it. And whether that key still exists somewhere, on a slip of paper, in a safe deposit box or in someone's head, the blockchain does not say.

So every estimate works with the same proxy: how long has a coin not moved? Someone who has done nothing with their bitcoin since 2011 has either died, lost the key or is the most patient investor in the world. Analytics firms draw a line somewhere and count everything beyond it as "probably lost". Depending on where the line lies and which known addresses (exchanges, custodians, governments) they exclude, they get different numbers.

How the dormancy of all coins is spread over the years is shown by HODL waves. This article only looks at the small, dark edge of that chart: the coins that never wake up again.

The estimates: Chainalysis, Glassnode and the Satoshi coins

Chainalysis, June 2020. The analytics firm split the roughly 18.6 million bitcoin mined at the time into groups. About 3.7 million had not moved for at least five years and were counted as lost. About 11.4 million were held by investors, about 3.5 million were actively traded. The 3.7 million has been the most quoted figure ever since, even though Chainalysis itself soon called it "a bit old".

Glassnode, 2020. The on-chain analysts at Glassnode arrived at about 3 million lost bitcoin at the same time. Later Glassnode figures of 7 million and more mean something else: all long-dormant coins, lost and hoarded together.

The Satoshi coins. In 2013, the researcher Sergio Demian Lerner found a pattern in the earliest blocks that points to a single, very early miner. About 1.1 million bitcoin are attributed to this miner, and everything suggests it was Satoshi Nakamoto. These coins have never moved. Whether Satoshi lost them, deliberately never touches them or is no longer alive, nobody knows. For the supply it makes no difference as long as they stay put. More in the profile Satoshi Nakamoto.

The Satoshi coins are not added to the 3.7 million. They have been dormant for over 15 years and therefore fall into every dormancy estimate.

The bitcoin that are certainly lost

A small part is not just probably but provably gone.

The genesis block. Nobody can spend the 50 bitcoin from the very first block of 3 January 2009. The code does not treat this reward as a normal transaction; it is not in any list of spendable coins.

Two duplicated blocks from 2010. Blocks 91’842 and 91’880 each contain a mining reward identical to an earlier one, which overwrote it. Twice 50 BTC, so 100 BTC, vanished this way. The developers closed the gap in 2012 with BIP 30, which names the two blocks as historic exceptions.

Burn addresses. Some addresses are chosen so that demonstrably nobody holds a key for them, such as "1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE". Whatever goes there is destroyed. An analysis from 2020 found over 2’700 BTC at more than 100 suspected burn addresses.

Unclaimed rewards. Some early miners paid themselves less than they were entitled to. Those fractions were never created. This is why even in theory the final supply will end up just below 21 million. The derivation is in Why there are only 21 million bitcoin.

Together that is a few thousand bitcoin. The large remainder of the estimates is what nobody can prove: coins whose keys disappeared somewhere along the way.

Famous cases: the hard drive in the landfill

James Howells, Wales. The IT worker mined bitcoin on his laptop in 2009 and in 2013, while clearing out, threw away a hard drive that by his account held the keys to about 8’000 BTC. It ended up in the Docksway landfill run by the city of Newport. For over ten years he asked and sued for permission to dig. In January 2025 the High Court in London struck out his claim; in March 2025 the Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal. He announced he would go to the European Court of Human Rights. The landfill is due to close. At the price of 7 November 2026, the coins would be worth about €540 million.

Stefan Thomas, San Francisco. The German-born programmer told the New York Times in January 2021 that he had forgotten the password to an encrypted IronKey USB drive. It holds the key to 7’002 BTC. The device allows ten attempts, then wipes itself. He had used eight. The manufacturer said it could not help.

Not everything called lost is lost. When the head of the Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX died in 2018, the first story was that only he knew the keys. The investigation that followed found that most customer funds had already been misappropriated before. And in July 2025, Galaxy Digital sold more than 80’000 BTC for a Satoshi-era investor, coins that had been dormant for about 14 years. In every dormancy statistic, they had until then sat on the "probably lost" side.

How much bitcoin is there really?

Let us calculate with a middle assumption. On 13 November 2026, about 20’111’000 bitcoin exist. Assume 3.7 million are lost, and a little over 16.4 million remain that someone can move. With a final supply just under 21 million, there will never be more than about 17.3 million.

The last column divides today's usable supply among all people: each would get about 0.002 BTC. What a satoshi is and why the unit is more practical for savers than a whole bitcoin is explained in Sats: bitcoin in small units.

What lost bitcoin means for the price

Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in the Bitcoin forum in June 2010, in essence: lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more; think of it as a donation to everyone. Arithmetically that is right. Someone holding 0.1 BTC owns 0.1 ÷ 20.1m of the supply, but 0.1 ÷ 16.4m of the usable millions. Their share of what really circulates is a good 22% larger than the bare figure suggests.

It does not follow that the price rises at the push of a button. Three reasons:

1. Old losses are already priced in. The market has traded for years knowing that Satoshi's coins are dormant. What counts are new, unexpected losses or unexpected returns.
2. New losses are becoming rarer. In 2010 a bitcoin was worth a few cents and nobody secured it carefully. Today there are BIP 39 seed phrases, hardware wallets and inheritance plans. Most losses date from the first years.
3. Coins can come back. A sale of 80’000 BTC in July 2025 went through without a crash, but it shows: anyone counting on 3.7 million permanently lost coins is too certain.

The site's Power Law model, by the way, needs no assumption about lost coins. It describes how the price has grown with time so far, not how many coins circulate.

A risk for old coins: quantum computers

Part of the oldest coins, including most of those attributed to Satoshi, sit in an early address format where the public key is openly visible on the blockchain. If a quantum computer were ever able to derive the private key from a public key, exactly these coins would be the first anyone could "find" again. Whether that happens, and whether the community freezes such coins beforehand, is open and disputed. The state of the debate is explained in Quantum computers and bitcoin.

Keeping your coins out of the statistic

Almost all the big loss stories have the same three causes: a single storage place, no backup that anyone else understands, and years in which nobody checked. Little helps against that, but it has to be done consistently:

• Seed phrase on paper or metal, in at least one second place. How to do it is in Storing your seed phrase safely.
• Check once a year that you can really restore the backup. A password you have not typed since 2017 is not a backup.
• An emergency plan for your family, so your coins do not join Satoshi's after your death. See Inheriting bitcoin.

The full path from exchange to multisig is described in Storing bitcoin safely.