What Happens When All 21,000,000 Bitcoins Have Been Mined?

Bitcoin is deflationary, meaning that mined coins are finite. Once miners unearth 21 million Bitcoins, that will be the total number of Bitcoins that will ever exist. But due to lost and forgotten wallets, the number of “active” Bitcoins will be far lower than that and there’s really no way to tell the exact number.

Bitcoins can be lost due to irrecoverable passwords, forgotten wallets from when Bitcoin was worth little, from hardware failure or because of the death of the bitcoin owner. It’s extremely improbable and effectively impossible to recover lost coins. As of March 31st, 2015, the total value of lost bitcoins was estimated at about $1.23 billion USD. A more recent number from late 2016 suggests that up to 25% of the circulating bitcoins (that’s just over 4 million) are “dead”, that would bring the estimate up to around $25 billion USD.