About 20% of the Bitcoins produced so far have been lost forever and will never come back.
Although more than 18.5 million BTCs have been produced so far, some of these Bitcoins are inaccessible, thus reducing the circulating supply.
Bitcoins can be lost, burned or forgotten in wallets. These three situations remove the aforementioned bitcoins from circulation.
Current estimates show that around 20% of the current Bitcoin supply is permanently lost.
The Bitcoin supply is limited to 21 million by design. This means that there will never be more than 21 million BTC in circulation unless there are serious changes in the production mechanism of Bitcoin.
Due to Bitcoin's controlled supply mechanism, only about 18.5 million Bitcoins (or 88% of the total supply) have been produced so far. Apart from that, the amount of bitcoin in circulation is much less, as the bulk of the Bitcoin supply (about 20%) is lost.
So if we are to make a rough calculation; As of December 19, 2020, there are 18,575,137 bitcoins in circulation in total. If we consider that about 20% of this is lost, the number of bitcoins lost is approximately 3,715,027.
18.575.137 - 3.715.027 = 14.860.110
So we can think that there are around 14.8 million bitcoins in circulation right now.
Overall, a fifth (20%) of Bitcoin in circulation hasn't moved for about 5 years, and there are three main reasons for that.
Satoshi's stash
Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, may have mined about 1.1 million BTC in the first few months that the bitcoin blockchain was operational. Since then, Satoshi's not touching his stash at all means he cannot move those bitcoins into the circulating supply.
Therefore, the general consensus is that Satoshi's Bitcoin assets are out of circulation, thereby reducing the current supply by about 5.9%. (30 years later, when there is a shortage of bitcoins, will Satoshi suddenly appear and circulate the bitcoins in his hand and collapse the price? We do not know for now.)
Whenever some bitcoins that were mined in the early stages of Bitcoin started to move, the following speculation in the cryptocurrency world immediately begins: Satoshi is back! This type of speculation causes immediate fluctuations in Bitcoin's price because the market can start panicking sales with the feeling that large amounts of Bitcoin previously thought to be locked in forever are being re-circulated.
Lost private keys
One of the main ways Bitcoins get out of circulation is simply to get lost. Since Bitcoin holders need to access their private key or recovery word in order to transfer their Bitcoins, anyone who loses access to them will also lose their funds.
While most of the time this only results in a small amount of money lost, there are a few instances where thousands of bitcoins have been lost. For example, he lost all his funds because he accidentally threw a hard drive containing 7,500 BTC ($ 172 million at current market value).
Bitcoin owners who pass away will also take their bitcoins with them if they do not transfer their private keys to anyone. See: What will happen to your bitcoin when you die? For example, when the 30-year-old founder of the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX died, he took with him the private keys of various altcoins worth about $ 190 million, including nearly 1,000 BTC. In another example, a Reddit user found 533 Bitcoins in an old computer belonging to his brother, who recently passed away, but could not make any transactions because they did not have private keys.
While it is impossible to say exactly how much Bitcoin was lost directly as a result of negligence or misfortune, it is at least likely to be in the tens of thousands.
Assuming any Bitcoin that hasn't been moving for more than five years is lost, about 20% of all Bitcoins fall into this category. According to a recent report, about 3.7 million BTC has not been touched for at least 5 years. This means about $ 40.6 billion of Bitcoin that will never be moved again.
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Bitcoins burned intentionally
First of all, let's explain what the "bitcoin burning" thing is for those who do not know. Some addresses do not have any known private keys. If you send bitcoins to these addresses, you will intentionally burn those bitcoins. Since the private keys of the address you send are not known by anyone, those bitcoins will be out of circulation forever.There are several reasons for deliberately burning bitcoin. For example, in 2014, the crypto money called CounterParty gave those who burned their bitcoins their own tokens XCP in return for the bitcoin they burned. You can view the address CounterParty uses for burning and whose private key is unknown, here. So far, more than 2,700 BTC have been sent to more than 100 known bitcoin burning addresses, and nearly $ 30 million worth of Bitcoins have been removed from circulation.
