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Comment by moneytalks | Hacker News Reader

Where does the $52 billion market valuation come from? All BTC ever created or those traded recently?

Any evidence of the # of coins lost forever? I know I had one or two from the early days that got forgotten and lost with a hard drive wipe.

Also, do BTC disappearing from circulation affect the currency differently than a fiat currency?

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> Where does the $52 billion market valuation come from?

That seems to be a mistake in the article. $52 billion market cap is of all currently tracked cryptocurrencies, not just bitcoin.[1] Bitcoin is ~$28.7 billion right now.[2]

[1]: https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/

[2]: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/

Another problem with that number is there is no way to tell if a coin is being hoarded or if it lost forever. If that hoarded number is high, it presents a risk that a hoarder could offload their coins and crash the market. If that hoarded number is low, it means the actual size of the market is much less than people claim.

Also, beware that the marketcap figures are not quite true [1]. They calculate based on the total supply rather than the circulated supply and on some (scam)cases like the recent Gnosis ICO it results in crazy amounts.

[1]: https://blog.sia.tech/want-to-deflate-the-token-bubble-fix-t...

That figure isn't right, it's about 29 billion.

As for lost coins, we can only guess. Much of this depends on whether you think the coins mined very early on by Satoshi are lost forever, or could come back into play. There's very roughly 1 million 'Satoshi Coins'. I'd estimate about another 500,000 that are lost on discarded hard-drives and whatnot. 1-2 million coins seems reasonable.

The only ones we know for sure are ones sent to 'Bitcoin Eater' addresses. Example: https://blockchain.info/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend... IIRC there are perhaps a few hundred lost in that way.

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