You said that BTC is easy to lose? In fact, Americans lose tens of millions of dollars in coins a year.

For many people, cryptocurrency is an esoteric technical term that is itself very easy to lose. Bitcoins worth millions of dollars can never be retrieved because of various reasons such as the loss of private keys.

In fact, according to LongHash's report at the end of 2018, there are currently 3.37 million BTCs that have been lost or destroyed. In other words, an average of about 421,000 BTCs are lost each year, which is about $2.566 billion per year at current prices. However, you may be surprised to find that Americans lose $62 million in physical coins (French coins) each year . The data comes from estimates by Covanta Holdings, a recycling and waste management company that claims 25 cents of coins per ton of waste. In addition, throughout 2016, passengers left more than $860,000 in funding through checkpoints at US airports, an increase of $100,000 over the previous fiscal year.

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Bitcoin loss is more scarce

According to the design, the supply of bitcoin is limited. Satoshi Nakamoto draws inspiration from gold and hopes to create a new type of digital asset with a sense of value: the total amount of BTC in circulation will never exceed 21 million. This suggests a significant ideological gap between cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and fiat currencies such as the US dollar. The US Mint produced more than 12.5 billion coins in 2018, but the encryption miners are only continually reducing the remaining bitcoin supply. When users forget their private keys or otherwise lock their own encrypted wallets, the BTCs they hold are often permanently lost and will no longer return to Bitcoin's economic system.

Bitcoin's supply is limited and users are losing Bitcoin, which may scare away some potential participants. However, Bitcoin investors often view this scarcity of bitcoin as a reason to attract their investment . For example, the founder of Litecoin Li Qiwei said in a proposal sent to his fans last year:

"Bitcoin will only have a maximum of 21 million. Even not enough BTC can have one millionaires in the world. So, before buying any other cryptocurrency (including LTC), try to have at least 1 BTC."

Physical currency and virtual assets have one thing in common

Whether you support physical money or digital currency, one thing is certain: producing physical currency is not without flaws. This, even the government must agree. After all, in 2017 alone, the US Mint spent $69 million to produce the smallest unit of the dollar, pennies.

It is easy to understand that novice cryptocurrency investors will be more likely to lose their assets, and in fact every year Americans will lose tens of millions of dollars in coins. This can't help but make physical money and virtual assets have one thing in common: both will cause a lot of loss due to human error.

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