Lost coins estimates

No one can measure lost bitcoin directly — "lost" (keys destroyed) is observationally identical to "held and dormant." Published estimates are inferences from coin dormancy and vary widely by methodology and date: Chainalysis has published figures from roughly 1.8M BTC (unmoved since 2014 or earlier) up to a 2.3–4M BTC "likely inaccessible" range; Glassnode has estimated about 3M BTC. A defensible debate-stage summary is "estimates commonly fall between roughly 2 and 4 million BTC, and all of them are inferences, not counts."

Nuance: Dormant coins periodically move (long-dormant wallets have reactivated after a decade or more), which retroactively falsifies any estimate that counted them as lost. Estimates also differ on whether they include Satoshi-era coinbases (~1M BTC often attributed to Satoshi) as lost.

Common misstatements:

• Quoting any single figure ("4 million bitcoin are lost") as established fact. — Every figure is a model output with contested assumptions.
• "Lost coins reduce the supply cap." — They reduce circulating supply in practice; the UTXOs still exist and the cap is unchanged.
• "Lost coins can be recovered by the network." — No mechanism exists to reassign UTXOs without their keys; doing so would require a consensus change widely considered a non-starter.