Nearly 90% of Bitcoins Have Been Mined

Today, one and a half years after the previous Bitcoin halving, total circulating Bitcoin (BTC) reached a key milestone, as 90% of the maximum total quantity has been mined. According to the latest statistics from Blockchain.com, the total number of Bitcoin in circulation reached 18.899 million on Monday, suggesting that just 10% of the entire supply remains to be mined.

While mining the initial 90% of BTC took around 12 years, the last 10% will take somewhat longer. Bitcoin’s unknown inventor Satoshi Nakamoto set a hard maximum of 21 million coins. This constraint is specified in the Bitcoin source code and is implemented by network nodes.

The Bitcoin hard cap is crucial to the currency’s and investment tool’s value proposition. It will need 119 years from now to finish the Bitcoin mining process, since the pace of new Bitcoin production is halved every four years in accordance with a predetermined protocol execution, dubbed the Bitcoin halving.

Due to the fact that the Bitcoin network generates new BTC exclusively as an incentive for miners confirming new blocks, the halving guarantees that less Bitcoin is created as the overall circulating supply grows. Miners have earned 6.25 Bitcoin for each new block validated from May 2020. This rate will be halved again in 2024, to 3.125 BTC per block.

By 2040, the block reward will have decreased to less than 0.2 BTC, with just 80,000 Bitcoin remaining out of a total of 21 million. Mining the last Bitcoin will take close to 40 years. Bitcoin’s price began the week with a new rejection of $50,000, as the end of the year nears. It is over 30% lower than its all-time high of $68,789 set on Nov. 10 at the time of publication.