- Magic of hard cap
- Why 21 million?
Seventeen years, two months and one week after the Genesis block was forged, the Bitcoin network has reached one of its biggest milestones to date.
According to the latest data, the 20 millionth coin has now been mined.
Magic of hard cap
Bitcoin’s scarcity is, undoubtedly, its main value proposition. There will never be more than 21 million coins due to a hard cap, and challenging it is viewed as heresy within the cryptocurrency community.
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Now that the 20 millionth coin has been successfully extracted by miners, there are exactly a million coins left. This means that an astonishing 95.2% of the cryptocurrency’s total lifetime supply is already in circulation.
However, anyone hoping to see the final Bitcoin being mined is in for a long wait.
The final one million will be dripped onto the market at a ridiculously slow pace. It is estimated that the last fraction of the leading cryptocurrency will not be mined until 2140.
The network is specifically designed in such a way that the speed of coin issuance is gradually reduced with the help of quadrennial halvings.
Back in 2009, miners could receive 50 BTC for one block. The first 10 million Bitcoins were mined in just under four years. The network underwent subsequent halvings, with rewards to 25, 12.5, 6.25 and down to the current 3.125 BTC.
The block reward will eventually become purely fractional, and it will take roughly 114 years to squeeze out the final 4.8% of the supply.
Why 21 million?
Satoshi Nakamoto never explicitly explained why the supply was capped at exactly 21 million, but there are some theories.
In an early email exchange with Bitcoin contributor Martti Malmi, Satoshi described the 21 million figure as an “educated guess.” They had to choose a number without knowing how large the network would grow.
There is also a macroeconomic-focused theory that revolves around the state of the global money supply around the time of Bitcoin’s creation. At that time, the global “M1” money supply was estimated to be roughly $21 trillion.
Source: https://u.today/20000000th-bitcoin-finally-mined-how-much-btc-is-left-after-major-milestone
