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Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B

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191 points aorloff | 5 comments | 04 Jul 25 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 1.082s | source
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Synaesthesia ◴[05 Jul 25 05:50 UTC] No.44470362[source]▶
I was also around when bitcoin just started out. Many people wanted it to be a global revolution in finance.

But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.

Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.

I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?

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ducksinhats ◴[05 Jul 25 08:54 UTC] No.44471196[source]▶
>What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?

I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.

Can you do the same for any fiat currency for next week?

It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems.

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lolc ◴[05 Jul 25 09:07 UTC] No.44471269[source]▶
Funny thing is, we don't know how many keys are lost. They say it's deflationary, and I say it's deflating to zero through key attrition. And people pay for burning electricity meanwhile. Weird game.
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kragen ◴[05 Jul 25 09:30 UTC] No.44471367[source]▶
We know it's not a large fraction, or anyway wasn't a large fraction a year ago, because the fraction of all mined Bitcoin that hasn't moved in the last year is only about 25%.
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1. lolc ◴[05 Jul 25 10:04 UTC] No.44471541[source]▶
Where did you get this number? All I can find is much higher, showing more than half of the coins have not been moved over a year.

https://en.macromicro.me/charts/32355/bitcoin-supply-last-ac...

https://charts.bitbo.io/dormant-coins/

Edit: If I understand correctly around 15% of coins has not moved in even ten years. So more than 20% of all the mined coins up to mid 2015 have not moved since.

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2. kragen ◴[05 Jul 25 10:47 UTC] No.44471765[source]▶
Maybe I remembered it wrong, or maybe I was just out of date. Thanks for the correction! Still, that's basically pointing at key attrition being a fairly minor phenomenon.
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3. FabHK ◴[05 Jul 25 11:42 UTC] No.44472048[source]▶
People complain about 5% inflation, and you call 20% or so of money supply gone "fairly minor"?
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4. kragen ◴[05 Jul 25 18:18 UTC] No.44474509{3}[source]▶
Yes; we're talking about 20% or so over 16 years, which is 1.25% per year, four times lower than the 5% per year inflation you're saying people complain about. And the anecdotal data suggests that that key attrition was concentrated in the early years, not just before there were Bitcoin ETFs, not just before there were exchanges, but before even the Bitcoin pizza.

But the big issue from my point of view is not the actual key attrition rate but the uncertainty of the money supply, because from my point of view, these are the important questions about key attrition:

- If Bitcoin goes to zero, what order of magnitude of money will the investor class lose? 200 trillion dollars, 20 trillion, 2 trillion, 200 billion, 20 billion, or 2 billion?

- How much money and power has Bitcoin transferred to its early adopters: 2 trillion, 200 billion, 20 billion, 2 billion, or 200 million?

- How much impact could awakening dormant coins have on the market? If Satoshi, or for that matter Hal Finney's heir or another early participant, started liquidating his early coins, would that be a tenth of the usual daily trading volume? Ten times? A hundred times?

Questions like these are why lolc brought up key attrition in response to ducksinhats saying, "It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems."

A key attrition rate of 99% or 90% to date would result in very different answers to these questions. But 20% or 50% to date is fairly minor in this context.

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5. FabHK ◴[06 Jul 25 03:53 UTC] No.44477688{4}[source]▶
Yes, good point. In terms of those macro questions, the key attrition is a minor issue.