Bitcoin does not really understand people or property. It just understands public and private keys. The 8999 remaining bitcoins are presently signed by a public key that has no corresponding private key -- this means they cannot be used in any transaction. Yes, they are effectively lost forever.
What amount of computational power would it take to brute-force recover that private key? For $81,000 it would be worth throwing some considerable hardware resources at it.
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Bitcoin does not really understand people or property. It just understands public and private keys. The 8999 remaining bitcoins are presently signed by a public key that has no corresponding private key -- this means they cannot be used in any transaction. Yes, they are effectively lost forever.
What amount of computational power would it take to brute-force recover that private key? For $81,000 it would be worth throwing some considerable hardware resources at it.