10% of the total Bitcoin supply remains to be mined
According to the latest reports, the total circulating Bitcoin has hit a significant milestone on December 13 morning, that is exactly one and a half years following the last Bitcoin halving, as 90 per cent of the maximum total supply has notably been mined.
The latest data from Blockchain.com has shown that Bitcoin in circulation currently has hit 18.899 million as of Monday, December 13. This means that only 10 per cent of the total supply is remaining to be mined. While the first 90 per cent of Bitcoin had taken about 12 years to mine, the rest would take much longer.
Bitcoin now has a hard cap of 21 million coins that had been set by its anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. This limitation is mentioned in Bitcoin’s source code and enforced by network nodes. The hard cap on Bitcoin is vital to its value proposition both as a currency and an investment tool.
As per Cointelegraph, it would take 119 years starting from now for the completion of the Bitcoin mining process owing to the rate of producing new Bitcoin that has been cut by half every four years in a pre-determined protocol execution, popularly known as the Bitcoin halving.
Since the Bitcoin blockchain is programmed to only create new Bitcoin as only a reward for miners after they have verified new blocks, the halving ensures that less Bitcoin is produced because the total circulating supply then increases.
Since May 2020, Bitcoin miners have earned 6.25 Bitcoin for every new block that was verified. This rate is estimated to have decreased to 3.125 BTC per block when the next halving occurs in 2024.
By 2040, the block reward would have reduced to less than 0.2 BTC while only 80,000 Bitcoin out of 21 million would be left up for grabs. The last Bitcoin would take approximately 40 years to mine.
Bitcoin’s price had started this week with a fresh rejection of $50,000 as the end-of-year close is nearby. Bitcoin is down by roughly 30 per cent from its all-time high of $68,789 that it reached on November 10 at the time of writing this news.
