Never Lose Bitcoin has published the first edition of the Custody Anxiety Index, a study of what people actually search for when they are afraid of losing their bitcoin.
The index combines the site’s own Google search data with published research from River, the SEC, Carnegie Mellon, and Chainalysis.
The headline finding is decision paralysis. In three weeks, searchers used different versions of “best wallet” to ask which hardware wallet to buy. They are not only looking for information. They are asking trusted experts to decide for them.
People cannot tell a seed phrase from a private key, and they ask the difference at least five different ways. A Carnegie Mellon study published at CHI 2025 found only 43.4% of participants could correctly recognize a seed phrase, and about 58% of those who recognized it wrongly believed it could be reset like a password. Such misconceptions might be the reason for a large share of permanent losses. 
The losses are real and large. River’s Bitcoin Custody Report (2025) conservatively estimates 1.57M BTC permanently lost through self-custody, 98% of it before 2020. Only 23.9% of US traders use a self-hosted wallet, versus 52.1% who keep their bitcoin on an exchange, according to a July 2025 SEC survey of 5,550 adults.
Two more patterns stand out. Custody research is a desk activity: 80% of searches happen on desktop, not mobile. And demand is global: searches arrived from 79 countries, with a consistent francophone cluster in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and Chad alongside heavy demand from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and El Salvador.
The full report is available at neverlosebitcoin.com, with a free preview through the first finding. The index is updated based on feedback, improved depth of data and new sources.
