The total amount of BTC that is provably lost. Provably lost coins fall into one of the following categories:
- Unclaimed miner rewards: The Bitcoin protocol states that the miner of a valid block can add a special transaction to claim a reward plus the transaction fees. Miners are not allowed to claim more than the specified reward, but they are allowed to claim less.
- BTC sent to burn addresses: We identify a burn address as an address whose private key has provably no owner. We consider addresses which are virtually impossible to be randomly generated, for example: '1Anything11111111111111111125qfuN'
- BTC sent to 'OPRETURN': OPRETURN is a script opcode that has been primarily used as a means of storing data on the blockchain. Coins sent to OP_RETURN opcode are provably unspendable as they do not get added to the UTXO set.