Less than 3 Million Bitcoin are Left to be Mined
Posted by HASSAAN MALIK
The reward obtained on mining bitcoin gets reduced to one half every 210,000 blocks which is approximately every 4 years due to the phenomenon of bitcoin halving. The upcoming halving scheduled for 2020 will be the beginning of the 4th era of the bitcoin mining out of the 34. With every passing era, half the number of bitcoins minted in the previous era is mined in the next era. The creator devised this approach to stop inflation from corroding bitcoin.
After the halving of 2016, 2.25 million bitcoins will be mined in the next three years and from there on it will take almost 8 years for the same number of new of them to be issued. In May 2020, the 3rd era of mining will come to an end, thereby, reducing the reward to 6.25 i.e. half of 12.5. The 2.625 million bitcoin mined in the third era will now have a wait of 120 years for the miners to meet this number. By 2140, all of the bitcoins are expected to be mined.
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We have only 3 million more left and only 120 years to mine them all. The number of bitcoins changes every 10 minutes when 12.5 BTC come into circulation with each new block. On average 144 blocks are mined per day making it 144 x 12.5 i.e. 1800 BTC per day.
There are approximately 200,000 miners in the pool named Slushpool and they have the 12% hashrate of the network, considering every pool has the same number of miners, one can estimate the total number of miners to be 1,000,000. Currently, miners earn most of their reward via mining but when all 21 Million BTC are mined, there will be no reward left to give however the small fee attached to every BTC transaction will become the source of earning for the miners.
Although there is still plenty of time left to buy bitcoin as there are another 120 years, the price of bitcoin might skyrocket so high that people couldn’t even afford a few satoshis, the smallest unit of bitcoin. Let’s see how the halving and fear of missing out (FOMO) contributes to the price of bitcoin.
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