Bitcoin Supply Drops To Less Than 18M Coins Because Of Locked Wallets

The bitcoin supply drops lower than the 18 million coins mined recently mainly because of the coins that haven’t been moved in a long time and other locked wallets as we reported in the latest bitcoin news.

At least about 1.5 million coins are locked and can never be retrieved. The ‘’live’’ supply of bitcoin reached about 16.5 million without the coins that may be lost. The concerning Bitcoin supply also includes the coins that were stolen. The research by CoinMetrics helps the case of the scarcity of Bitcoin but right now even with a few thousand Bitcoins trading can sway as it was seen in the past few days.

The daily bitcoin trading moves between 2 and 3 million coins and the exchanges hold on the 6.7 percent of the total supply standing as the ‘’biggest’’ whales on the market. Also, there are some known bitcoin addresses and coins but it is technically impossible to trace each Satoshi to the wallets.

BTC has also been lost for many technical reasons including the unclaimed block reward and the 50 BTC in the Genesis block that is not accounted for in the ledger itself. Some of the other reasons include sending the coins to non-existing addresses or even BCH addresses and the most common reason could be lost seed phrases or losing the private keys overall. The scarcity of Bitcoin has been mentioned in regard to the size of the world’s economy or even with the wealth of the United States.

The idea of ‘’hyperbitcoinization’’ or having too many bitcoins in order to it to become the global reserve currency, has led to extreme predictions for the price of a single BTC in the millions of dollars. Bitcoin got between 500,000 and 700,000 active addresses per day and the number of addresses is now hovering around 500,000 active ones. The thousands of coins are being moved for active trading each day and are holding the coins which have not led to appreciation.

The trading activity and liquidity have led to discovering the higher BTC prices and the network also follows the potential of market price action with the increased coin usage during the price rallies. Earlier this year, despite the drive for retail investors to own bitcoin, there was a growth recorded In addresses that had 1,000 BTC or more. The addition of custodial services could also mean that more coins are kept away from active circulation for a longer time.