Vaulted supply

The equivalent number of bitcoin that are not participating: cold storage, long-term holders and coins lost forever, all bundled into one figure. It is an upper bound on how many coins are lost.

DefinitionCirculating supply x (1 - liveliness). Active supply plus vaulted supply equals circulating supply exactly.

LimitIt bundles deliberate hoarding with permanent loss and cannot tell them apart. The paper puts it at 7.674M BTC in May 2023 against age-band "lost coin" estimates of 3.9M to 5.5M, which is the size of the ambiguity. Being corrected: this is built on active or vaulted supply, which the pipeline derived from the coinblocks liveliness while the published liveliness is coin-days. The gap averages 74,759 BTC of active supply, a median of 0.8%. The rebuild onto coin-days is under way and this caveat retires with it.

UnitBTC