Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: How many Bitcoins have been provably lost? At least ...
by
zebedee
on 04/07/2014, 03:09:15 UTC
Another source of lost coins is due to miners taking less than the maximum block reward which in effect "de-mines" an amount of coins equal to the difference between the allowed reward and the taken reward.
I'm aware of two coinbases that have identical hash to two others.  This represents a permanent destruction of 100 BTC.

https://blockchain.info/tx/e3bf3d07d4b0375638d5f1db5255fe07ba2c4cb067cd81b84ee974b6585fb468
https://blockchain.info/tx/d5d27987d2a3dfc724e359870c6644b40e497bdc0589a033220fe15429d88599

This is why version 2 blocks embedding block height were created.

What I'm curious about, and it's hard to check without software, is if either of the earlier in time of each of the two was spent before the later one was created.  In which case the coins wouldn't be lost.  I suspect they were unspent and lost, but it'd be cool if someone confirmed.