Joyful Take.

From the edition of September 21, 2026 Warm, curious, carefully sourced takes on the day's most interesting stories. Translate
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21 Million Bitcoin Will Ever Exist, and Millions Are Already Gone for Good

Bitcoin's code will only ever produce 21 million coins, no vote, no exceptions. I went looking for how many of those coins are actually still reachable, and the honest answer is: probably several million fewer than the headline number.

3 min read September 21, 2026 edition
A small open treasure chest on a low wooden table holding exactly twenty-one glowing coin shapes, with a few coins near the back rendered translucent or half-buried in a small mound of sand.
Not every coin that exists is a coin anyone can still spend. Illustration: Joyful Take.

On May 22, 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two large Papa John's pizzas. He had posted the offer four days earlier on a bitcoin forum, reasoning that it would be interesting to say he had once bought food with the stuff. A 19-year-old regular named Jeremy Sturdivant took him up on it, ordered the pizzas, and collected the coins. At the time, the whole transaction was worth about $41.

Sixteen years later, on that trade's anniversary in May 2026, those same 10,000 coins were worth $777.87 million, based on bitcoin's price that week. That was actually down from $1.106 billion a year earlier, since bitcoin itself had fallen over that stretch. I ran that last figure myself against today's price, since nobody had published it yet: at today's roughly $85,000, the same pile would be worth about $850 million. Nobody knows for certain whether Sturdivant still holds any of it, and that uncertainty is really the whole story of bitcoin's supply.

A ceiling that cannot move

Bitcoin's total supply is capped at 21 million coins by the rules of the software itself, not by any company's promise. Miners earn new coins on a fixed, halving schedule, and around 20 million of those 21 million had already been mined by early March 2026, when the network crossed that threshold around block 939,999. The remaining million will trickle out slowly. I traced the long tail back to CoinDesk's own reporting on the issuance schedule rather than repeat a secondhand number: the last whole bitcoin is expected around 2105, with fractional issuance continuing until roughly 2140.

The coins nobody can reach

Here is where the number gets more interesting than 21 million. A meaningful share of bitcoin that has already been mined is functionally gone: forgotten passwords, discarded hardware, wallets whose owners died or vanished without passing on a key. Estimates from Ledger and Unchained Capital put the permanently lost figure between roughly 2.3 and 4 million bitcoin, or 11 to 18 percent of the total supply that will ever exist. Add the roughly 1.1 million bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto mined in 2009 and 2010 and never touched again, and the effective circulating supply looks closer to 16 or 17 million than 21 million.

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.

Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin forum post, June 21, 2010 (source)

Satoshi wrote that fifteen years before anyone knew whether bitcoin would still be around long enough for the joke to matter. Researchers tracking dormant coins have since found that more than 566 bitcoin a day are aging into "ancient" status, meaning untouched for over a decade, while miners have produced only about 450 new bitcoin a day since the 2024 halving. The pile of bitcoin nobody is using is growing faster than the pile of new bitcoin coming in.

The fortune buried under an actual landfill

No case makes the point better than James Howells, a Welsh IT worker who threw out a hard drive holding 8,000 bitcoin during a house clear-out sometime between June and August 2013. The drive, and the private keys on it, are believed to sit under roughly 25,000 cubic meters of household waste at the Docksway landfill in Newport, Wales. Howells sued Newport City Council for the right to dig it up, seeking close to 495 million pounds. Judge Andrew John Keyser dismissed the case on January 9, 2025, ruling it had no realistic prospect of success, and the Court of Appeal turned down his appeal that March. By August 2025, Howells had given up on physical recovery and announced a new plan instead: a cryptocurrency called Ceiniog Coin, built around his claim to bitcoin he can no longer touch.

I did the same rough math here that I did for the pizza: at today's price, that buried hard drive holds about $680 million in bitcoin that nobody, including its own owner, can spend.

That is the strange arithmetic of a currency with a hard ceiling. Twenty-one million was always going to be the limit. What nobody wrote into the code was how many of those coins would end up buried, forgotten, or frozen in a wallet nobody can open, which turns out to be the more interesting number.

Sources

Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Links open in a new tab.

  1. Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day, the 16th Anniversary of Laszlo Hanyecz Paying 10,000 BTC For Two Papa John's PiesBitcoin Magazine, 2026-05-22.
  2. Satoshi's Lost-Coin Quote Hits 16-Year Mark as Millions of BTC Are Deemed Lostnews.Bitcoin.com, 2026-06-21.
  3. Bitcoin's Invisible Burn: Lost Coins Outpace New SupplyBitGo, 2026.
  4. Bitcoin supply approaching 20 million: the final million will take another 114 years to mineCoinDesk, 2026-03-03.
  5. Bitcoin buried in Newport landfillWikipedia, 2026.
  6. From landfill to lawsuit: James Howells' quest to reclaim lost BitcoinCointelegraph, 2025.
  7. After 12 Years of Failed Attempts, the Man Who Lost a Hard Drive Holding $819M in Bitcoin Finally Calls It QuitsDaily Galaxy, 2026-08-12.