Never to be retrieved?

That leaves 20.020.000 Bitcoin available in total

Or even less, maybe

Imagine that, not twenty one million BTC, but way less. And there have been a lot of Bitcoin lost. Wallets disappeared, private keys losts, HD wallet keyphrases gone, it happened quite a lot. Many unspend addresses holding a lot of value in BTC, never moved and probably never will. Same accounts for all the forking Bitcoin splitting blockchain clones out there. BTC might be even more scarse than believed until now.

There was this one man that suggested a while back to try and retrieve the BTC of those unspend addresses. It did create quite a shock in the Bitcoin community. How on earth would that even be possible!? And why? Trying to crack the private keys!? Was this what C.S. Wright was suggesting? It seems highly unlikely, very improbable, that it could be done like that.

And it already was proven in court, just recently, that he is unable to proof he owns a lot of (early mined) Bitcoin {BTC}. While he apparantly did manage to piss off the judge. If you wonder why BSV is still gaining in value, then C. Ayre, business partner of mister C.S. Wright, has the answer to that. He tweeted that he is still mining BTC (yes their so deeply hated enemy), with his pool, so he can buy more BSV. And I do not know how much this is in numbers, but it could be used to pump the price of BSV...

Enough about those gamblers!

It is an interesting idea though, to look at the unspend Bitcoin addresses and add up their value. Then lock them down and declare them as if they were burned. Somehow writing it in stone, or putting it inside the blockchain. A state machine kind of thing. And then mining could move on for a longer time, to get closer to a real 21 million BTC. Where the same would account for the clones.

But what would be the criteria to declare unspend (mined) addresses as burned coins. So they could be mined again? In Steem there is an actuall burn address, @null, which serves as deflation. In theory those burned Steem could be issued again. And if more get burned than newly are being created then Steem would get more scarse. That could make it more valuable. And what if those unspend addresses are left like that on purpose?

Stranger things have happened

It is a kind of weird that somebody who is supposed to have a lot of private keys to those early unspend (mined) addresses wants to lock them down. So the Bitcoin lost in there can then be (re)mined. Many things just do not add up like they should, I think. Especially now that mister C.S. Wright was unable to proof in court that he has the Bitcoin he was supposed to have the private keys of. Or they were placed in a trust of which mister D. Kleiman was a secret key holding member of.

But he died and took his password to his grave with him. And as the story goes mister C.S. Wright is using his (claimed...) super computers to try and decrypt some harddisks that were encrypted by the late mister D. Kleiman. A former business partner and friend of mister C.S. Wright. If this is the case then it could be a long time before mister C.S. Wright can show evidence of the excistence of a lot of Bitcoin that he controls. And thus also BSV, BCH, BTG, BTD and so on and so forth...

Satoshi remains a mystery

Even though mister C.S. Wright still claims he is the man behind the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto, he cannot seem to deliver the final proof. And when he has no control over those early mined Bitcoin then he can not hand over the believed share of the late mister D. Kleiman. This means that the real Satoshi Nakamoto is still unknown, a mystery. Although I thought it was D. Kleiman, it also seems improbable to me now.

Does it even matter? No, I do not think so. In a way it should remain a mystery. It might be even better for mister C.S. Wright and his family for him to be unable to have acces to a large amount of Bitcoin. (As he stated himself in court.) And thus also to all of the same addresses of the forking blockchain splitting clones of BTC.

If the real Satoshi is somebody else, alive and kicking, then that one could really destroy all value of BCH, BSV, BTG, BTD and others. Just by swiping the private keys into an HD wallet. Chances are though that this never ever is going to happen. And a lot of unspend addresses will remain as such. No 'lock and remine' to be expected, at least not on the one and only real Bitcoin BTC blockchain.

May the Cryptos be with us

Some Bitcoin lost for ever?

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