Miners around the world are now fighting for the remaining 10%, which is just over 2 million Bitcoins.
Bitcoin, the most famous cryptocurrency, has just passed an important symbolic milestone: according to the specialist site CoinTribune, 90% of Bitcoins issued have now been mined. This means that 18.89 million of these tokens are in circulation today and miners around the world are now competing for 10% of the original volume.
Like all currencies, cryptocurrencies are not issued in unlimited quantities; like a traditional currency, their value comes from the fact that there is obviously a limited and predefined number of tokens (21 million in the case of Bitcoin). Mining is therefore essentially a vast race to claim ownership of these tokens. Very roughly, it is the creation of a block in one of these famous blockchains which therefore serves as a deed of ownership.
120 years to mine the remaining 10%
To have the chance to seize it, a miner must be the first to validate a series of operations which today require great computing power, and therefore high-end computer hardware; the more powerful their machine, the faster they can perform these operations and thus claim a newly issued Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is therefore the object of a big race for computing power to be able to carry out these operations (and therefore to mine) as quickly as possible; we therefore see a big overall increase in hashrate, that is to say, summarily the overall computing power devoted to these operations. A safeguard has therefore been put in place to prevent the entire stock from being undermined in a few weeks; the difficulty of the operations to be carried out to “mine” a Bitcoin regularly doubles to counterbalance the overall increase in hashrate. The aim is to ensure that new Bitcoins continue to be introduced to the market gradually.
Because of this phenomenon, it will take many more years before the stock is completely exhausted. The mining of 2,100,000 BTC should therefore be more demanding than ever in terms of computing power and energy required. For this reason, it should take around 120 years for all Bitcoins still available to be allocated according to CoinTribune.
In this context, it will be interesting to observe the price of Bitcoin in the coming months. Because knowing that the world of cryptocurrencies has already proven that it is very sensitive to announcement effects, we can therefore wonder if this symbolic milestone will not trigger a new form of “Bitcoin Rush” before the source dry up.
