Since the launch of bitcoins at January the 3rd 2009, 17.9 million bitcoins came into circulation. At the launch of bitcoins, One million bitcoins were put in circulation, the remaining 16.9 coins were generated through mining over the years with 3.2 million bitcoins still to be mined over the coming 100 years.
The total value of these bitcoins is around 180 billion dollar (September 2019). The real shocker is that 30-50% of these coins are estimated to be lost forever. Although no hard numbers are available, these estimated indicate that at least 20 billion worth of bitcoins have been lost up to a staggering 90 billion worth of lost bitcoins in the worse case scenario. Many of these coins are lost by people trowing away old computers and hard-drives containing wallets with private-keys needed to access before bitcoins became so valuable. However, a large part of these coins are not truly lost since only the password to access them has been lost, not the wallet containing the private-keys. Wallet passwords or passphrases can be recovered in most cases through our wallet password recovery service as well as by other wallet password recovery services. The key to recovering the passwords are hidden in your brain even if you are not aware of them.

Are your coins among the 20-90 billion worth of lost bitcoins?.. do not despair but read on and learn how to ‘hack your own brain’ and recover your lost coins in my next blog on Memory recovery & digital forensics.