Satoshi’s 2010 remark hits 16 years as 3.1M BTC lost

On June 21, 2010, in a Bitcointalk thread titled “Dying bitcoins,” Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto wrote: “Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.” The post addressed a question about forgotten wallets and included a note that computers would need to become roughly 2^200 times faster before recovering most lost coins could outpace mining.

Multiple analyses compiled through mid‑June 2026 place the midpoint estimate of permanently lost bitcoin at about 3.1 million BTC. The central range runs from 2.7 million to 3.9 million BTC and a wider envelope spans 2.3 million to 5.25 million BTC. On June 20, 2026, Glassnode reported a circulating supply of 20,045,680.42 BTC; at the 3.1 million midpoint that represents about 15.5% of all mined bitcoin.

On‑chain proof of permanent loss is limited. A 2025 study by Mohamed El Khatib and Arnaud Legout used entropy filtering and machine learning to identify confirmed burn addresses and counted 3,197.61 BTC as permanently destroyed through block 840,682 (April 24, 2024). Adding Bitcoin’s unspendable 50 BTC genesis reward produces a small provable floor; losses above that rely on probabilistic methods and inference.

Supply‑age measures show larger totals of long‑dormant coins. Glassnode’s supply‑by‑age data for June 20, 2026 lists 3.557 million BTC untouched for more than 10 years, 1.690 million BTC in the 7‑to‑10‑year band and 1.479 million BTC in the 5‑to‑7‑year band. By those buckets about 5.25 million BTC have been dormant more than seven years and about 6.73 million BTC more than five years. Glassnode labels coins inactive beyond seven years as “Inert Supply” while noting that some old coins can and do move.

Estimates of early mining activity affect the totals. Research that identified the so‑called “Patoshi” pattern initially attributed roughly 1.1 million BTC to a single early miner. Later analyses have placed that figure nearer 700,000–750,000 BTC, while other work has estimated about 1,125,150 BTC across early blocks. Whether those coins are counted as lost, dormant, or simply unattributed changes aggregate lost‑coin tallies by hundreds of thousands.

Custody failures and exchange breakdowns are additional sources of permanent losses. A 2025 custody report from River estimated about 1.57 million BTC lost to self‑custody mistakes, with 98% of those losses occurring before 2020. The same report noted more than 3 million BTC lost or rendered inaccessible when including exchange failures and other factors. Mt. Gox’s roughly 740,000 BTC loss has been partly recovered and is subject to a rehabilitation distribution process. A separate personal loss involves a discarded laptop hard drive belonging to James Howells that contained an estimated 7,000–8,000 BTC; courts denied excavation efforts in January 2025.

Analysts note that burn‑address proof is small and age‑based dormancy metrics are probabilistic. Exact figures for permanently lost bitcoin cannot be established with certainty.