In the past year, 11.58 million bitcoins have not been sent, sold or relocated. According to an analysis by Rhytm, he investigated all active bitcoin receiving addresses. He emphasizes that this is special, certainly because the price of bitcoin has risen by 85% in the same period.
Rhytm shows that in the graph below. The red line indicates the number of bitcoins that are fixed.
11,580.00 bitcoin have not moved in over a year.
Even with a 85% increase in price during that time, those millions or bitcoin were not sold or traded.
Hodlers or last resort are insane. pic.twitter.com/KTpeDrL100
– Rhythm (@Rhythmtrader) December 1, 2019
Why is nothing happening with those bitcoins?
But if the price has risen by 85% in the past year, why are those coins not being sold or traded? Is the price simply ignored? Opinions are divided on this. Not surprising, because those 11.58 million bitcoins are also spread over thousands, if not millions of wallets.
Lost coins
According to many estimates, more than 3 million bitcoins are lost forever. That’s because people have lost their private keys or just forgot. Because of this nobody has access to these coins. There are also bitcoiners who unfortunately died and did not share their passwords with their loved ones.
And 3 million is even optimistic for many. They think the real figure can be as much as 4 million bitcoins. That is almost 20% of the total bitcoin offering. According to the tools of bitinfocharts.com, since 1 March 2015 there are 4 million bitcoins unmoved at different addresses. It could just be that the passwords are lost.
At the moment, just over 18 million bitcoins have been mined and 11.5 million of them have not been touched for a year, or 64% of all available bitcoins have not been moved for a year. In total 3 million bitcoins are added, until 21 million are mined.
Anyway, every lost coin ensures that your bitcoins become a bit more scarce.
HODL for life
Another possibility is that a large part of those 11.5 million bitcoins are from HODLs. They have bitcoins but invest for the long term, if they already see it as an investment. There are various reasons for not spending your coins now. There are speculators among them, hoping for an astronomically high amount of fiat. There are also people who see bitcoin as an insurance against bad economic times. Just like why some people withhold gold.
And then there are the bitcoin maximists, who hope that bitcoin will become a globally accepted currency.
There is a popular hashtag for HODLs and that is #stackingsats, or the stacking of satoshis. This is especially popular among private bitcoin maximists.
Some of those 11.5 million bitcoins also belong to exchanges and other companies, which (must) hold many bitcoins as reserves.
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