Bitcoin's value hit an all-time high this week and is at an all-time high, thanks in part to the actions of major US financial corporations.
Investment firms are spending billions of dollars buying the cryptocurrency. In recent weeks, they have become "whales," the term given to individuals or institutions that own more than 10,000 bitcoins (at the time of this article's publication, 1 bitcoin is worth more than US$≈ 100,000, or R$≈ 600,000).
The cryptocurrency system only allows for a total of 21 million bitcoins in circulation - so far, around 19 million have been created. The rest still needs to be mined.
But after all, in whose hands is all this money?
Bitcoins can be lost because people forget their digital wallet passwords or lose access for some other reason — and there’s no “customer service.” Just ask James Howells, who lost 8,000 bitcoins on a discarded hard drive in Wales.
According to crypto researchers at Elliptic, 3.15 million bitcoins have been dormant for 10 years or more. Some analysts, such as those at Chainalysis, say that bitcoins that haven’t been moved in the past five years may also be lost. So the actual amount of crypto that has simply been lost could be much higher.
A commonly accepted rough estimate is 3.5 million. But 1.1 million of these dormant coins likely belong to Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, so we can remove that portion from the equation. A conservative estimate for lost coins, then, is around 2.4 million, or 11% of all Bitcoins.
