Questions we get asked

Pick the year, enter the rent, and the calculator will tell you what that money would have become — which is exactly as upsetting as it sounds. A month's rent in 2013 Bitcoin is the kind of number that explains why this website exists.

This is the diamond-hands counterfactual, and it's the calculator's exact job: enter what you held and when you got it, and it prices the timeline where you simply never touched it. Warning — the never-sold number includes the crashes you'd have had to sleep through to earn it.

We genuinely don't know, and we never give financial advice — that's the one rule of the Bureau. What we can do is quantify the past with precision: run the numbers on the date you first thought about it, and replace the vague ache with an exact one. And if you decide for yourself that better late beats never, the partner exchanges listed below offer sign-up bonuses — a small head start, honestly disclosed: we earn a commission.

Mostly no. The people who “missed it” also missed the exchange collapses, the lost keys, and the years of refreshing a price chart at 3am — the Archive is full of people who didn't miss it. Get the number, frame it, move on.

You stop running the mental calculator every time the price moves. Run the real one once, get the actual number, put it on a certificate, and let the document carry it so you don't have to. Closure, at a fraction of what therapy charges.

The difference between what you sold for and what those coins are worth now. The calculator computes it from your dates and amounts; the certificate notarises it. The Bureau recommends doing this exactly once.

Because your brain runs the counterfactual automatically — psychologists call it “what-if thinking”, and crypto is its perfect fuel: the alternate timeline is public, precise, and updates every second. You can't turn the mechanism off, but you can run it once, properly, and stop doing it daily.

The unhelpful answer is “time”. The Bureau's answer is: make it official. A loss that's been measured, printed, and certified stops being an open question your brain has to keep checking. That's the entire theory of the certificate, and it costs less than the transaction fees you paid selling.

The classics: panic-selling the dip, buying the top, keeping coins on an exchange that stops existing, and storing a nine-figure private key on a single piece of paper. The Archive keeps a museum of the greatest hits, priced live, so the lessons stay vivid.

Constantly. Plenty of people sold “too early”, paid off real debts, and slept fine ever since — a realised gain spends; a theoretical one doesn't. The regret only arrives when you keep checking the chart, which is a habit, not a verdict on your decision.

Honestly: without the private key or seed phrase, no — the cryptography doesn't bend, and anyone charging an upfront fee to “recover” it for you is almost certainly a scammer. The legitimate exceptions involve finding something you still have: an old backup, a drive, a password manager. One man's AI-assisted version of exactly that is in our Archive.

Nothing — which is the strange part. Lost coins stay on the blockchain forever, fully visible and completely unreachable, like money sealed behind museum glass. Every lost coin makes the remaining supply scarcer, so the people who lost keys involuntarily subsidised everyone who didn't.

The most-cited estimate, from Chainalysis, is 2.3 to 3.7 million BTC — roughly a fifth of all the bitcoin that will ever exist. It's a dormancy-based estimate rather than a confirmed count, and we keep a full case file on where the number comes from.

Search every old computer, drive, and email account for wallet.dat files, exchange signup confirmations, and seed phrases in notebooks; tools like btcrecover can help if you partially remember a password. Be methodical, tell no strangers, and pay no one upfront. The best recovery story we have on file started with someone simply re-reading their old files.

The seed phrase is the master key: if any copy of it exists anywhere — paper, photo, password manager, the back of a manual — that recovers everything, regardless of the forgotten password. If the seed is truly gone and the password truly forgotten, brute force only works when you remember most of it. We won't pretend otherwise; some losses are real. We can at least tell you what it's worth.

It's a genuine trade-off, and not one we'll decide for you. Self-custody means nobody can touch your coins but you — and this entire Archive is a museum of what “but you” can mean: landfills, IronKeys, notebooks. Exchanges give you password resets, support desks and two-factor recovery, which is exactly why many people choose them — balanced against the fact that you're trusting a custodian, and we keep a Mt. Gox file for a reason. Whichever way you land, the partner exchanges below are where our referral links point; we earn a commission and say so.

Then you're in historic company — see the landfill, the IronKey, and the rest of the Archive. Enter what it held and the calculator will price it live, and if you want the loss made official, that's literally our business: a certificate for the wallet that got away.

James Howells, a Welsh IT engineer, whose drive holding 8,000 BTC went to a Newport landfill in 2013. He spent twelve years trying to dig it up — lawsuits, robot dogs, an offer to buy the dump — before giving up in 2025. The full case file, with the live value of what's still down there, is in our Archive.

On 22 May 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas — the first real-world Bitcoin purchase, worth about US$41 at the time. Crypto now marks the date annually as Bitcoin Pizza Day. Our case file prices the pizzas live, by the hour, which is either a public service or a public cruelty.

By raw size, Mt. Gox: roughly 850,000 BTC lost when the exchange collapsed in 2014, with creditors still being repaid over a decade later. For sheer plot, QuadrigaCX — where the CEO died holding the only keys, and investigators then discovered most of the money had never been there. Both files are in the Archive.

An estimated 1.1 million BTC, mined in the earliest days and untouched since 2010. Nobody knows whether it's lost, abandoned, or patiently held — making it the largest unclaimed certificate on earth, and the only entry in our records filed under both “lost” and “winning”.

Roughly US$13–1,100 across 2013 and about US$1,000–20,000 over 2017 — within each year the range was enormous, so the date matters more than the year. We keep a live page per Bitcoin year (open, peak, trough, and what $100 became), or pick your exact date in the calculator.

Around US$126,000 in October 2025, at time of writing. The all-time high is the regret industry's reference number — “what if you'd sold the top” — and the calculator's strategy ladder will happily show you that timeline alongside the one where you held.

It uses real exchange price history and a live spot price, with data attribution in the footer — the same numbers the market used, not estimates. What it can't be accurate about is the alternate universe: it assumes you'd have actually held, which, as the Archive demonstrates, is the hard part.

Generally yes — the ATO treats selling, swapping, or spending crypto as a capital gains tax event, with a 50% CGT discount if you held over 12 months, and it data-matches Australian exchanges, so it already knows. This is general information, not tax advice; an accountant is cheaper than an audit.

Proceeds minus cost base — what you sold it for, less what you paid including fees. Our calculator shows the what-if timeline; your exchange records hold the cost base the ATO actually cares about. General information only, not tax advice.

Capital losses can generally offset capital gains (not ordinary income), and unused losses carry forward — your accountant will want the records, not the feelings. For the feelings, we issue a Certificate of Loss, which is legally worthless and emotionally load-bearing. Not tax advice; the certificate goes on the wall, not in the return.