The scarcity of digital gold far exceeds people's understanding, but most traders haven't realized what this means.

Recently, when I looked at Bitcoin prices, I thought not "Is it rising ridiculously?" but a more painful question: How much Bitcoin is actually available for trading in the market?

Data tells us that nearly 19 million Bitcoins have been mined, approaching the 21 million cap. It seems like the supply is somewhat certain. But if you check the on-chain data, you'll find that the situation is much more complicated than imagined.

**On-chain analysis agencies' data is striking: approximately 2.3 million to 7.8 million Bitcoins have disappeared permanently.** Forgotten private keys, broken hard drives, lost holders... These Bitcoins are like falling into a black hole, never to be retrieved.

From a different perspective, out of the 19 million mined, only about 12.1 million to 17.6 million are likely still in circulation. Do the math on the gap — these are not small numbers.

Satoshi Nakamoto said in 2010: "Lost Bitcoins only make other people's coins more valuable. Consider it a donation to the entire community." Few took this seriously at the time, but now this prophecy is being fulfilled on a scale we can't imagine.

Having immersed myself in this field for many years and seen various market cycles, I must say that most investors severely underestimate the impact that this "silent deflation" can have on the market. The actual contraction of effective supply is far deeper than any policy news.