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It's about the rate of exchange. Out of the $200M of bitcoins, only a small fraction is available for sale on exchanges...
by mrb 14y ago
It's about the rate of exchange. Out of the $200M of bitcoins, only a small fraction is available for sale on exchanges...
- duaneb 14y agoAhh, that makes sense.
- rmc 14y agoNo doubt a large amount has been permanent lost. All it takes is for one early adopter with 100,000 bitcoins to lose their wallet a few years ago. those are gone for good now.
- badgar 14y agoI never thought much about the effect of permanent loss on Bitcoin. Unlike cash, encrypted wallets and the block chain make theft harder than just destruction of the money. A virus which deletes wallets instead of trying to exfiltrate BTC seems much easier to implement and would be pretty devastating for the currency.
- sroecker 14y agoIt has been estimated on bitcointalk that around 1-2% have been lost. That's not really a large amount. You can still divide bitcoins into satoshis (1E-8) or even further with a protocol change in the future.
- illuminate 14y agoOut of curiosity, does this estimate account for stolen wallets, or are these still considered viable?
- sroecker 14y agoI did some research: Around 0.6% of all Bitcoin are known to be lost, so with unknown losses it could be 1-2%(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.120 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.120) Excluding the Pirate scam, 2.9% have been stolen. These are still viable, some are tainted since the receiver address is known. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0)
- truebecomefalse 14y agoI have a wallet with ~2,400BTC and I forgot my encryption passphrase. It was >400 chars and I know most of it but I'm making some mistake somewhere in my recall. If the value keeps going up I'm going to have to get serious about cracking that wallet.
- KPLauritzen 14y agoI would think that roughly 50k USD would be enough incentive for most people to start remembering REALLY hard
- truebecomefalse 14y agoI meant measures beyond remembering really hard. Writing software to brute force it with the bits I already know. Believe me I'm pretty unhappy about the situation. Provisioning EC2 GPU instances and the like and writing the grammars.
- chii 14y agoa 400 char passphrase? dude, thats crazy. If someone has the incentive to break into your wallet, all you need is a phrase long enough to make physical violence a better alternative for the attacker, and you're set, no need to make the phrase any longer.