There are about 1,1984,000 Bitcoins that have yet to be distributed. With just 21 million Bitcoins ever generated, there are now about 19 million Bitcoins available. Due to factors like hard drive catastrophes and misplaced private keys, it’s expected that 30% of those 19 million will be permanently lost.
What or Who Determines How Many Bitcoins are Left?
The rest of the Bitcoins are stored in a pool dedicated to rewarding miners for maintaining the network’s integrity. As a reward for verifying transactions and producing new blocks, miners get the remaining Bitcoins from this pool. The Bitcoin source code lays out how mining rewards should be distributed and when they should be provided.
The mining reward for each block started at 50 Bitcoins and has since been “halved” three times. The current payment is 6.25 bitcoins every block, which corresponds to about $250,000 in prizes per block as of the May 2020 Bitcoin Halvening.
When Will Bitcoins be Obsolete?
The mining reward is half every 210,000 blocks. Because blocks take around 10 minutes to mine on average, halvings occur every four years.
After 64 total halvings, there will be no more Bitcoins to reward miners, and all 21 million Bitcoins will be in circulation. In the year 2140, this will occur.
“What incentive do miners have to validate transactions if there are no block rewards?” you may wonder.
Miners get more than just block rewards when they create new blocks. They also benefit from the fees associated with each transaction. The amount of network congestion and the magnitude of the transaction influence the transaction’s cost.
Miners frequently favor the transaction with the highest Satoshi/byte fee. The higher the transaction fee, the more likely a miner will execute your transaction.
Transaction fees should be high enough to motivate miners to keep the network running when there are no more Bitcoins available for mining rewards.
What is the Total Number of Bitcoins That are till to be Mined?
With little over 1.1 million bitcoins still unmined, miners have plenty of incentive to mine the network in search of the block reward.
What Will Happen to Bitcoin After 21 Million BTC Have Been Mined?
Bitcoin was created with the goal of releasing its full supply by the year 2140, giving us plenty of time to speculate on what will happen.
Will Bitcoin’s price climb after every BTC has been mined? Yes, according to one school of thought, the cryptocurrency will experience significant deflationary pressure when every bitcoin is mined. Variables outside of BTC’s programming, such as users losing their BTC in a number of ways, compound the problem.
It’s also worth mentioning that we use US dollars to calculate Bitcoin’s value, which is an inflationary currency. If they both make it to the next century, their price parity will very definitely be radically different.
