In 2030 the milestone of 20 million mined BTC will get reached. The last BTC would complete its mining process in the year 2140.
A few days away from its thirteenth anniversary, bitcoin circulating approached a total of 90% of its maximum supply of 21 million. It is also vital to consider that, in a relatively short amount of time, 18.9 million BTC completed its mining process, and only 2.1 million remain to get mined.
This Monday, December 12 at 8:30 pm (UTC-4) CoinMarketCap records a circulating of 18,899,743 BTC, with just 257 BTC remaining to complete the total issuance of 90% of the maximum of 21 million. On the other hand, the site bitcoin-supply.com shows a supply of 18,896,578 BTC, just 0.004% of the 18.9 million BTC that marks the arrival of 90% of the BTC supply.
The Vital Features of the First Cryptocurrency
The limited supply of Bitcoin is one of its most vital attributes because this cryptocurrency has an assigned maximum cap. This maximum cap gives cryptocurrency an inelastic supply.
On the other hand, and in addition to the absolute limit of 21 million, Bitcoin integrates a supply that is exponentially decreasing, bringing disinflationary characteristics to Bitcoin. Every four years, the reward in BTC for each block generated can get reduced by half in events known as halvings. These events happen every 210,000 blocks.
The first implication of this policy is that the total number of BTC mined in the four years following each halving is half of those mined in the previous period.
For this reason, although only 10% of BTC remains to get mined, the fact that every four years, half of the BTC of the previous period gets issued considerably lengthens the number of halvings needed to reach the ceiling of 21 million.
In other words, the objective of this scheme of exponential reduction of the reward per block and the BTC issued for each post-halving period is to guarantee that there is still BTC to get mined for the years to come. The last BTC will get issued approximately in the year 2140.
Halvings and the Amount of Mined BTC
As an example of limited supply growth, when the first halving took effect, the cryptocurrency was 50% of the total supply, 10.5 million BTC. Then 25% and 12.5% got added in the two successive periods. At this time, it reaches 18.9 million BTC, while the 1.1 million to approach 20 million BTC will require a time of more than eight years since that milestone will get reached in 2030.
From then on, the issuance of the additional 1 million BTC needed to complete the maximum supply will require more than a century, 110 exact years.
By: Jenson Nuñez
