I just ran a quick analysis on the blockchain.
Out of the 192386 blocks currently mined, very many of them
have a BTC 50 block reward that has never been spent.
To be exact, 41493 blocks have an unspent reward.
That is worth approximately BTC 2'074'650.00 (not counting fees).
That's 2 Million+ pristine coins hoarded, or about 20% of the BTC market cap.
Out of the 192386 blocks currently mined, very many of them
have a BTC 50 block reward that has never been spent.
To be exact, 41493 blocks have an unspent reward.
That is worth approximately BTC 2'074'650.00 (not counting fees).
That's 2 Million+ pristine coins hoarded, or about 20% of the BTC market cap.
Can you make an analysis to check if these coins really are lost:
"Bitomat.pl Loss
Time: 2011-07-26"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0
Or maybe someone has been able to actually spend them after 'losing' them?
If the private key is lost, it's prohibitively expensive (both time and effort) to recover it (you need to guess). Equally expensive as recovering the private key to any address. Not going to happen. Lost is lost, you can subtract the lost coins from the bitcoin money supply.
I lost BTC 10 myself
.Thanks for link to interesting thread.
Yes, of course, if it really is lost... ;-) But could we find out, if the claimed lost coins has actually been used afterwards? Just by examining the block chain?