Bitcoin Custody Incident Archive Statistics
Aggregate patterns across documented Bitcoin custody incidents included in the CustodyStress archive. These statistics summarize cases in which access or recovery by a legitimate owner, heir, or authorized party became constrained, delayed, or blocked.
The archive documents custody survivability failures. It does not attempt to document all Bitcoin losses, hacks, thefts, or scams.
- Loss of recovery materials — seed phrases, passphrases, or required devices — produces the highest blocked outcomes among documented custody incidents in the archive.
- Documentation status is strongly associated with survivability. Cases with interpretable recovery documentation are substantially more likely to result in eventual access than cases with no documentation or ambiguous instructions.
- Structural dependencies that eliminate all alternate recovery paths, particularly single points of failure and undocumented recovery procedures, appear more frequently than any other pattern in the dataset.
- Multiple constraints frequently occur together. Owner absence combined with missing or unclear documentation is among the most common compound failure conditions in observed cases.
Seed phrase and passphrase unavailability produce the highest blocked rates in observed cases. Owner absence and legal authority barriers more often result in constrained recovery.
These figures describe cases included in the archive, not the prevalence of failure across all custody systems.
Dependencies that eliminate all alternate recovery paths produce substantially higher blocked rates than dependencies that create delay or require coordination.
Single-point-of-failure and undocumented recovery dependencies appear more frequently than any other structural patterns in observed cases.
Multiple stress conditions frequently appear together. Owner absence combined with missing or unclear documentation is among the most common compound constraints in observed cases.
These statistics summarize cases included in the CustodyStress archive. They describe observed patterns in documented custody incidents and do not attempt to measure all Bitcoin custody failures or losses.
- The archive is observational, not exhaustive.
- Cases are drawn from documented sources and submissions.
- Statistics describe patterns within the archive dataset only.
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