It’s about time we left this 18th Million bitcoin count. Ever since I have known bitcoin and been researching about bitcoin, we have always been in the 18th million circulating supply. The total bitcoin supply is 21 Million but 18+ million have been mined off the blockchain for the past 12 years. This just the number of bitcoin recorded to be mined off the blockchain, so it’s assumed to be in circulating supply. But there are lots of bitcoins that have been lost, like being sent to the wrong address or forgetting the keys to their wallet.
So there are approximately 18.99 Million Bitcoin mined, this means that few more mining and the total bitcoin mined from the blockchain will be 19 million. I believe that if the world took bitcoin as serious as they are taking it now 10 years ago, the total amount of bitcoin mined will be far lesser. This is because, 10 years ago there was no mining competition. That’s why you find people losing enormous amount of bitcoin by either forgetting their keys or losing their hardware wallet by mistake. Sometime ago we read a blog about a man who lost over a thousand bitcoin by throwing his hardware away by mistake. When I saw that I was like 😳 how did you mine that much quantity of bitcoin.
Then I remembered that mining bitcoin between the year of 2009 and 2015 was really cheap and easy, No competition, you could solve the puzzle and go with a lot of bitcoin as reward for solving it. There were sites that gave free bitcoin to people who solved a captcha. We also have the fella who bought pizza with 10,000 BTC. What did the person who received the 10,000 BTC do with it? We don’t know know, we only hear about the pizza buyer who bought the pizza with 10,000 but nothing from the pizza seller who got 10,000 BTC. Did he sell the 10,000 BTC, did he HODL it or did he lose it? We don’t even know if that 10,000 BTC is among the current circulating supply.
Let’s go back to 19th Million getting mined soon, how soon? Well according to analysis, the 19th million bitcoin will get mined on the 31st of March. This time the circulating supply of bitcoin will change to 19 Million instead of the usual 18 Million+ supply. There is approximately less than 4,500 Bitcoin left to be mined to get the circulating supply to 19 Million. After that we will have only 2 Million Bitcoin left in the entire world to be mined.
How long will it Take To Get The Remaining Bitcoin Mined
Well with the rate at which the competition in mining bitcoin is becoming really high, we have approximately 6 years or more. There are about 900 Bitcoins getting mined everyday so if the figure remains constant then it will take 6 years but if the competition keeps getting higher, the rate of mined bitcoin will be lower because lots of people will be competing for same amount of bitcoin so it’s possible to see like 10 years before the remaining 2 Million supply get completely mined.