Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Lost coins vulnerable to theft in the future?
by
BlackHatCoiner
on 14/06/2022, 19:16:46 UTC
Let's say there are even 2-3 mil. coins that are lost (nobody has private keys anymore).
That's a big assumption. There are millions of bitcoins to P2PK outputs, many of which get spent frequently throughout the years. Definitely people lost a fortune back in 2009 due to some accident, but it's no way millions. Perhaps few hundreds of thousands have been non-provably lost. Impossible to know exactly nor to approach it effectively.

Note that there are addresses with revealed public keys that do have a balance and aren't P2PK outputs, such as 1P5ZEDWTKTFGxQjZphgWPQUpe554WKDfHQ. Those are in the same danger as well if their owners don't move them to a quantum-safe address.