According to a recent research conducted at New York University, majority of bitcoin miners have been transferring their rewards within 36 hours of acquiring them and that less than 1 percent of the miners left their rewards intact in 2012 and 2013.
Luqin Wang and Yong Liu's paper, an analysis on the "evolution" of pool mining, says that one of the reasons that miners didn't move their bitcoin is because they probably lost access to those wallets, and hence locked them out permanently. Perhaps, these miners got involved in the bitcoin ecosystem not for monetary gain, but because they considered it as a "fun technology" that could be played with casually, they said.
"When bitcoin became valuable, they might have, unfortunately, lost their [access] so they couldn't cash out! This suggests that lots of bitcoins mined in the first two years might have been lost permanently!"
The paper is to be presented at the Passive and Active Measurements Conference, in New York on 19th March.
