Its price Bitcoin it rose to $56.000 on Friday, pushing the combined value of all bitcoins past $1 trillion – at least in theory.
This price is more than its market capitalization Facebook. Bitcoin's value has nearly doubled from $29.000 at the start of the year.
Above we say “theoretically” because not all bitcoins are available for use. Each bitcoin (or fraction of a bitcoin) is protected by one or more cryptographic signatures. To transfer a bitcoin, you need to know its corresponding private key. And some of these wrenches have been lost. It is impossible to know how many.
For example, a British man claims to have thrown away a hard drive in 2013 that contained keys to 7.500 bitcoins – worth about $400 million at today's prices. He asked permission for excavation of the waste, but the request was rejected.
Such incidents have been repeated many times in the last 12 years. It was probably a very common occurrence in the first two years of bitcoin operation, when cryptocurrency had no value. In 2010, someone paid 10.000 bitcoin for two pizzas, a transaction that is now widely recognized as the first commercial payment with bitcoin.