Lost bitcoins?

[horseshoe3]

Heard on the radio about a guy who had 7,000 bitcoins on an encrypted flash drive and forgot the password. He had used 8 attempts and if he failed two more times, the flash drive would self-delete. Sucks to be him.

So my question is what happens if his bitcoins are lost? I assume they just disappear. If they disappear, since they are on a flash drive, the market wouldn't know right? It would be as if they are still in storage.

So, a significant (I assume it's significant) amount of bitcoins disappear and the market has no way to adjust to the new supply/demand reality. Does this cause a significant market distortion? Over time, as this happens to more people, is there any discovery mechanism to signal that the remaining bitcoins should be worth more?

[Shami-Amourae]

Lost Bitcoins simply are a deflationary component to it. If no one knows the private keys technically they are lost forever.

Likely they will never be recovered, and this trend will continue forever. It makes your Bitcoin more and more rare over time.

Keep in mind Bitcoin goes to 10 decimal points, so you could run the world economy off of one Bitcoin theoretically.

[Cebu_4_2]

Lost Bitcoins simply are a deflationary component to it. If no one knows the private keys technically they are lost forever.

Likely they will never be recovered, and this trend will continue forever. It makes your Bitcoin more and more rare over time.

Keep in mind Bitcoin goes to 10 decimal points, so you could run the world economy off of one Bitcoin theoretically.

This is exactly why I quit. Lost a bit in the beginning never to recoup. Could have a lot now but all gone... nice. Enjoy

[horseshoe3]

Can bitcoins be saved on multiple devices so you have a backup in case one goes down?

[StreetsOfGold]

Someone has already suggested a solution. If the BTC miners can agree to a "confirmed loss" , they can use a smart contract to "re-create" them in some way, thus restoring the total available.
Same can be done in the future for other confirmed losses. How they would confirm these losses is still to be determined. This one is held by a former founding member of Ripple, so it might be considered.

[Shami-Amourae]

Can bitcoins be saved on multiple devices so you have a backup in case one goes down?

As long as your wallet is on multiple devices yes.

There's several multi-platform wallets I've mentioned before. I recommend the following:

Exodus
https://www.exodus.io/

Atomic
https://atomicwallet.io/

Coinomi
https://www.coinomi.com/en/


Each of these wallets you can download and use on your computer and smart phone. All of them have built in atomic swaps so you can trade for other coins without KYC in your own wallet.

You can also memorize the seed phrase for your wallet or even the private key. As long as you memorize that information you can recover your crypto without having any thing else but the shirt on your back. You cannot do that with any other asset class or form of money.

[Bigjon]

Lost Bitcoins simply are a deflationary component to it. If no one knows the private keys technically they are lost forever.

Likely they will never be recovered, and this trend will continue forever. It makes your Bitcoin more and more rare over time.

Keep in mind Bitcoin goes to 10 decimal points, so you could run the world economy off of one Bitcoin theoretically.

All these keys are based on prime numbers. Since McCanney discovered a method to calculate all the prime numbers, I'm pretty sure some bright math person will be able to use a table of all those numbers to recreate the private key from it's corresponding public key.

This is something that the whole bitcoin community ignores from what I've seen.