According to data from Glassnode, it's estimated that nearly 3.8 million Bitcoin — about 20% of total supply — are likely lost forever. These coins haven’t moved in over 5 years and are considered „dormant“, suggesting that they may be stuck in inaccessible wallets due to lost keys or forgotten seed phrases.
The most famous case is Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose wallets contain around 1 million BTC that have never been touched. Other losses stem from early adopters who mined or bought Bitcoin before it had value — often storing it on hard drives or wallets that no longer exist.
This built-in scarcity is one reason Bitcoin’s value proposition is so strong. While 21 million coins can ever exist, the real circulating supply is likely closer to 16–17 million. That makes being a “wholecoiner” — someone who owns 1 BTC — even rarer than you might think.
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