Say hello to the new set of bitcoin representing the 19th million series, it’s been a long journey but they are here now. It’s been 13 years since the creation of bitcoin, after 13 years we have less than 2 Million left to be mined off the blockchain. I am no expert in bitcoin mining but I feel that the bitcoin mining competition would have made mining bitcoin way harder in the past if more people knew about bitcoin. Imagine if lots of people were competing and validating blocks in the past, do you think it would have been possible to have mined this amount of bitcoin if competition was this high in the past?
Bitcoin was created by the pseudonymous entity, Satoshi Nakamuto, whose Identity is not known, to control inflation. This was done by making bitcoin really scarce and halving the mining block after every 4 years. Yeah, this means that for every 4 years mining bitcoin becomes more scarce than it was. The initial amount of bitcoin used as reward for mining bitcoin during its first period of existence was 50 Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamuto was the miner. The number has been halved ever since then, 4 years after the first mining block reward, 25 bitcoin was the reward for mining a block, the next 4 years after that was 12.5 and now we are sitting on 6.25 Bitcoin. This helps to create more scarcity for bitcoin, if it wasn’t designed this way, the entire bitcoin supply must have been fully mined.
Its going to take close to a 100 years before the entire bitcoin supply gets fully mined off the blockchain. That’s a long time and kudos to Satoshi Nakamuto for thinking ahead. It’s amazing how this brilliant technology was created and left for the community to take it up from there. In the next 50 years another set of technological generation will be working on the bitcoin blockchain technology to make it more better and more complex and the journey continues from there.
But after the last set of bitcoin gets mined off, we will have no bitcoin left to reward miners, miners will have to depend on transaction fees to reward theirselves. But will this make transaction fees more expensive? Well that’s going to be in the next 100 years or more, I am sure a better solution to make transaction fee cheaper would be available by then. But how will the miners make profits if the transaction fee is cheap. Validating blocks require complex computers and electricity, these don’t come cheap.
This is something I can’t get off my mind ever since I read a blog post about Bitcoin’s halving process. In the next 100 years, do you even think that crypto currency will be trending by then? Lots of ideas have been sprung up from crypto currency, 50 years ago, the stock and shares market was the trending thing, but now cryptocurrency has taken over. That will probably be the case for bitcoin and cryptocurrency, whatever it is, I trust that crypto and bitcoin will be its predecessor.