That’s between 17 and 23 percent of all bitcoins in existence. As of this writing, bitcoins are valued at about $16,650, which means that at least $46,287,000,000 worth of the cryptocurrency has more or less totally disappeared. The vast majority of those missing bitcoins – which do not included those which have been hacked or stolen – are from the early days of Bitcoin. For example, Chainalysis’ findings assume that all of the original bitcoins mined by the mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, are permanently lost, locked away forever. But here’s where things get tricky, it can be hard to tell if a given sum of bitcoins are truly lost, never to be spent or circulated, or if they’re merely being horded. It’s a complicated situation, and the world may never know exactly how many bitcoins have been lost when all is said and done. As Chainalysis’ Senior Economist Kim Grauer put it to Fortune: If Chainalysis’ findings are correct, it could be that bitcoins are more scarce than commonly believed, but like everything else involving cryptocurrencies the question of whether this could cause another spike in bitcoins’ market value has a complicated answer. Here’s Grauer again: In the meantime, if you have any bitcoins, keep hold of them if you can!
