Bitcoin Scarcity Fast Approaching: 90% of BTC Mined
Bitcoin, the first-ever cryptocurrency was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009 with a total supply of 21 million units only. Unlike our traditional Fiats which have no specific supply, cryptos do have a specific quantities except for a few tokens/ coins which have unlimited supplies such as Ethereum, Hive et cetera
It is noteworthy that a new Bitcoin is usually minted/ created into the market through a process called Bitcoin mining. According to investopia, Bitcoin mining is the process of creating new bitcoin by solving a computational puzzle. It further adds that Bitcoin mining is necessary for maintaining the ledger of transactions upon which Bitcoin is based.
As at the early days of BTC, there were still large volumes of BTC yet to be mined. Meaning, Bitcoin wasn't really scarce then and its demand wasn't high as well. However, the reverse is the case now.
It appears that Bitcoin scarcity is fast approaching as a larger percentage of Bitcoin's supply has been mined by miners. It appears that Bitcoin miners have become very sophisticated over the past several years, using complex machinery to speed up mining operations.
In fact, news has it that over 90% of Bitcoin to ever exist has been mined. In other words, less that 2 million bitcoins are yet to be mined. This implies that, about 18.89 million bitcoins have been mined so far within the space of 13 years. In relation to that, the remaining 10% of the "unmined" bitcoins is estimated to take a very long period to be mined.
According to some estimations, it is going to take the next 100 years, probably in the distant year 2140 before the 21 millionth bitcoin will be created. This estimation was arrived at while paying cognizance to certain factors like halving events, mining difficulty and the likes.
It might also interest you to know that not all bitcoins will get to enter into the public market for trading. This is so because more than 3.5 million bitcoins have been “lost” due to misplacement of private keys or even deaths of wallet owner.
This issue is particular with Bitcoin most early adopters who had some BTCs but failed to keep their keys safe. Hence, some bitcoins have been presumably lost forever as they cannot ever be retrieved. This in turn makes Bitcoin even more scarce. In essence, it's important to keep your keys safe and secured.
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