Investors likely to lose almost $545 million worth Bitcoin in 2022 by forgetting passwords and various other mistakes, suggests report

According to a new estimate, bitcoin investors are projected to lose up to $545 million this year due to a variety of factors such as forgetting wallet passwords or making a mistake when recording their "seed phrases."

A seed phrase is a string of words generated by your bitcoin wallet and used to gain access to the crypto linked with it.

Analysts estimate that at least 20% of all Bitcoin has been lost, with the majority of those funds being irreversibly lost.

According to recent study from CryptoAssetRecovery.com, Bitcoin, the most valuable crypto over the likes of Ethereum, Ripple, Quint and so on will lose between $272 million and $545 million this year.

"However, this does not include Bitcoin lost as a result of frauds or theft; while such monies are lost to the original wallet holder, they are not lost to the total Bitcoin money supply." According to the article, "those funds will most certainly continue to circulate."

People also transmit crypto to a burn address or to an address on a different network mistakenly (or occasionally purposely) and lose it.

Every 10 minutes, a new Bitcoin block reward is produced, and the block reward in 2022 is 6.25 Bitcoin. In 2024, the block reward will be halved once more, to 3.125 BTC per block reward.

"Since there are 525,600 minutes in a year, and a block reward is issued every 10 minutes, 52,560 block rewards or 328,500 BTC will be issued in 2022," the report noted.

"It's evident that the vast bulk of the 3.8 million Bitcoins lost were lost early in the blockchain's history, before it had any economic worth."

Given that 2-4 percent of the 328,500 Bitcoin mined in 2022 is likely to be lost, this means that between 6,570 and 13,140 Bitcoin will be lost.

"At $41,500, this indicates that between $272 million and $545 million in Bitcoin alone is expected to be removed from the Bitcoin money supply in 2022," according to the research.

According to Coindesk data, Bitcoin's price dipped below $40,000 on Wednesday, while other major cryptocurrencies were trading in the red.

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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ue3cx8/investors_likely_to_lose_almost_545_million_worth/