Only 10% of the Bitcoin supply left for mining

New data shows that 90% of the total Bitcoin supply will be mined, but the rest will take a little longer.

The total amount of Bitcoin in circulation (BTC) reached a major milestone on Monday morning, a year and a half after the last bitcoin halving, as 90% of the total maximum supply was mined.

Current data from Blockchain.com shows that there were 18.899 million bitcoins in circulation on December 13, which means that only 10% of the total remains to be mined. It will take about 12 years to mine the first 90% of BTC, the rest a little longer.

Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins set by the anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. This limitation is written in the Bitcoin source code and is enforced by the network nodes. The hard cap on bitcoin is important to its value proposition as a currency and investment vehicle.

Bitcoin offer in circulation. Source: Blockchain.com

As stated by Cointelegraph, it will take 119 years for bitcoin to be mined, as the rate of production of new bitcoins is halved every four years according to a predefined protocol, also known as bitcoin halving.

Since the Bitcoin blockchain generates new BTC only as a reward for miners who verify new blocks, halving the number of bitcoins ensures that the total circulating resources increase. As of May 2020, miners have earned 6.25 bitcoins for each newly confirmed block. That rate will drop to 3.125 BTC per block the next time it drops by half in 2024.

By 2040, the block reward will fall below 0.2 BTC, leaving only 80,000 bitcoins out of 21 million bitcoins. It will be almost 40 years before the last bitcoin is mined.

The bitcoin price began the week with a $ 50,000 decline as the end of the year approached. This is nearly 30% below the all-time high of $ 68,789, which was reached on November 10 at the time of writing.