During the Building-on-Bitcoin conference held in Lisbon on July 3-4, aCasaHODL developer and creator of statoshi.info, Jameson Lopp said that according to some estimates, 4 million bitcoins have been lost forever and a further 2 million were stolen from users.
Therefore, as of July 2018, around 6 million bitcoins are said to be untraceable and are not tracked on the blockchain network. Also given that no hardfork is planned to recover the lost amount, 28.5% of bitcoins form the total emission of 21 million could be gone for good.
According to analytics, the maximum amount of bitcoins that will be available cannot exceed 15 million even though 17 million coins have already been released onto the market. But of those, only 11 of those can effectively be used, send or received. Earlier in June, Blockchain analysis platform Chainalysis, has revealed a that at least 3,790 million bitcoins could be ‘lost’ somewhere in the blockchain.