Only 10% of the Bitcoin supply left for mining

New data shows that 90% of all Bitcoin supply will be mined, but the rest will take a little longer.

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The total number of Bitcoins in circulation (BTC) reached an important milestone on Monday morning, a year and a half after the last Bitcoin halving, as 90% of the total maximum supply was mined.

Current data from Blockchain.com shows that Bitcoin in circulation hit 18.899 million on December 13, which means that only 10% of the total supply remains to be mined. While the first 90% of BTC will take about 12 years to mine, the rest will take a little longer.

Bitcoin has a hard limit of 21 million coins set by the anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. This restriction is written in the source code of Bitcoin and is enforced by the network nodes. A hard cap on Bitcoin is important to its value proposition as a currency and investment vehicle.

As outlined by Cointelegraph, Bitcoin mining will take 119 years to complete from now as the rate of new Bitcoin production is halved every four years in a pre-defined protocol, also known as Bitcoin halving.

Related: History of Bitcoin: When Did Bitcoin Start?

Since the Bitcoin blockchain only generates new BTC as a reward for miners who verify new blocks, halving fewer Bitcoins guarantees if the total circulating supply increases. As of May 2020, miners have earned 6.25 bitcoins for each newly verified block. That rate will drop to 3.125 BTC per block the next time it halves in 2024.

By 2040, the block reward will drop below 0.2 BTC, leaving only 80,000 bitcoins out of a total of 21 million bitcoins. It will be almost 40 years before the last bitcoin is mined.

Bitcoin price started the week with a $ 50,000 decline as the year end quickly approaches. It’s almost 30% lower than the all-time high of $ 68,789 that was hit at the time of writing on November 10th.