The Total circulating Bitcoin hit a significant mark today, one and a half years after the last Bitcoin splitting, as 90% of the maximum total supply has been mined.
Current data shows Bitcoin in circulation hit 18.899 million ,meaning only 10% of the total supply is left to mine. While the first 90% of BTC took about 12 years to mine, the rest will take a little longer.
Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins set by its creator Satoshi Nakamoto. This limitation is written in Bitcoin’s source code and imposed by network nodes. The hard cap on Bitcoin is critical to its value proposition as a currency and an investment tool.
It would take 119 years from now to complete the Bitcoin mining process due to the rate of producing new Bitcoin being cut by half every four years in a pre-determined protocol execution, also known as the Bitcoin halving.
Since the Bitcoin blockchain only creates new BTC as a reward for miners verifying new blocks, the halving guarantees less Bitcoin is produced as the total circulating supply increases. Since May 2020, miners have earned 6.25 Bitcoin for every new block verified. This rate will decline to 3.125 BTC per block in the next halving in 2024.
