$36.5 Billion Worth of Bitcoin has Been Lost - Back Up Your Wallets!

Hi Steemians! @mazzle here.

At the time of writing, there are currently 16.71 million Bitcoins in circulation. Sadly, it's been found that roughly 3.8 million bitcoins have been lost. At the time of writing, bitcoin is currently valued at US$9,600 so the lost bitcoins are valued at US$36.5 billion. This figure is quite simply unfathomable.

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Most bitcoins have been lost as a result of being stored offline on external disk drives and other storage devices. And as it turns out, some of the stories resulting from lost bitcoins are a mix of hilarious, sad and just plain odd.

There's the story of the Game Developer in Melbourne who mined bitcoins in early 2009 on his PC (back when you could actually mine coins on a normal PC). The poor guy mined thousands of coins, but found that he was running out of storage space on his computer so transferred the coins onto a cheap USB stick. When he saw the price of Bitcoins reach $980, he remembered his Bitcoin wallet and plugged it into his computer..... the USB stick died... everything was lost. And now he is too scared to tell his wife about how wealthy they could have been.

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Then there's the story of the tech journalist who bought 1400 bitcoin for $25 via Paypal transfer when they were worth between 1.2 and 1.5 cents each. This journalist stored them on an old clunky external hard disk that had an annoying ticking noise. After a few years, and when moving house, he threw the hard disk out with a load of other old tech junk.

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It wasn't until the price hit about $2.50 per coin that he thought about the stash of coins he had thrown away. At this time his stash was only worth about $4000. This was a frustrating amount of money to lose, but nothing compared with what his 1400 coins are worth today - an incredible US$13,440,000. Weirdly, the guy doesn't seem too upset about his loss. I guess he's had plenty of time to reflect on his poor decision making and is comfortable with his current situation.

There are plenty of other stories of people losing their Bitcoins or giving them away when they were worth virtually nothing. An IT worker in Wales lost 7500 bitcoins (worth about US$72,000,000) after throwing away and old hard disk that contained his Bitcoin wallet. There's also the story of a programmer from Florida who bought two pizzas in 2013 for 10,000 bitcoins (now worth about US$96,000,000).

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Just to make things even more interesting, there are approximately 5 million Bitcoins that aren't being actively traded (these are weirdly referred to by some as zombie Bitcoins). These are Bitcoins that haven't been in circulation for at least 18 months (or when the Bitcoin price was incredibly low compared to current values). Given that the owners of these coins must, by now, be seeing gains exceeding as much as 5000% and haven't been brought back into circulation to realise profits, it is quite possible that a large percent of these coins have also gone missing and so are permanently out of circulation.

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So, the moral of the story is quite simply to avoid giving away or disregarding something that, while it may be low in value now, could very well appreciate in value to levels that we've never seen before. We live in incredibly exciting times and our financial institutions are changing right before our eyes. What we view as worthless today, could be worth millions in the very near future.

Never underestimate the crypto market! It's brings new surprises every day.

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