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You can use inactive UTXOs, and different age cut-offs to estimate possible lost bitcoins. With different age cut-offs, you will have different estimations and they are all not accurate.https://www.bitcoinmagazinepro.com/charts/hodl-waves/
There are always very old, and inactive UTXOs suddenly become active again and make your estimations inaccurate. It's only important by knowing a fact that there are lost bitcoins that contribute to higher value of Bitcoin and it's gift for all of us.
Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.
You have essentially stated what I already mentioned. You call it inactive UTXOs, which essentially add to total BTC coin age. But a dormant wallet is not a lost wallet as this here shows:
The post is from April 2024. Now it is more or less safe to say that most of these 50 BTC wallets are lost because those were probably some nerds playing around mining a block and then lost interest and did lose or forget about the keys. But there is no way to say how many of these wallets are indeed dead in the water.
When I read this
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I think the estimation about lost wallets is way to aggressive. Asserting that wallets with unspent UTXOs since 2014 can reasonably be considered lost is a joke in my opinion. 2014 was the time when people started figuring out all the stuff about handling wallets and so on because the info was out there, Youtube channels popped up, guides were there and so on and so forth. I understand that those who experimented with mining in 2010 may have lost the coinbase transactions here and there because they lost interest, hence the many 50 BTC wallets, but not in 2014. Coins have still been lost since then of course, but I can tell that those who have been around had a very good clue how to safely store BTC and those who newly joined had access to essential info.
What's more, BTC had crossed the $1,000 mark already in 2013. Everyone knew that this is more serious than buying pizzas with 10,000 BTC. There is no way it can make sense that Chainalysis defines wallets as lost when coins haven't moved since 2014. I don't know what you think, but to me it is ridiculous and I am honestly not sure why they would come up with that idea. I'd just call them dormant and let everyone else come up with their own opinion. I don't think Satoshi's coins are lost. It's possible, but I assume they are not because why would I bother? It makes more sense for everyone to take them into account rather than optimistically write them off the BTC supply balance sheet hoping that it boosts the value of my holdings due to increased scarcity.