March 28, 2024

18 million BTC has already been mined, how difficult will it be to get the remaining 3 million?

18 million BTC has already been mined, how difficult will it be to get the remaining 3 million?

18 million BTC have already been mined; Now the world's first cryptocurrency is one step closer to completing its issuance in 21million coins.

It's good to watch BTC's progress, but it's worth paying attention to the next 3 million, said Alex Adelman, CEO of rewards platform Lolli.

Note that their extraction will take as much as 120 years.

The mining rate for the next 3 million BTC will begradually decline due to the halving, which occurs every 210,000 blocks (or approximately four years), and reduces the reward for new BTC by 50%. The last Bitcoin is expected to be mined in 2140.

After all, once BTC mining is complete,miners will rely solely on fees for transferring coins to the blockchain. According to skeptics, this could undermine the structure that encourages miners to record verified transactions on the ledger.

Currently, for each block mined, miners receive a reward of 12.5 BTC plus any additional transaction fees, which typically do not exceed 1 BTC.

In turn, Paul Brody, world leader ininnovations in the auditing firm Ernst & Young (EY), said BTC's limited supply could limit the cryptocurrency's usefulness as a global reserve currency. Brody said:

If Bitcoin became part of the global currencysystems, then we would have to solve the problem of [limited supply], because many economists agree that deflationary systems are not always effective.

What's next?

Both Walch and Brody suggested that the BTC limit of 21 million could one day change. But what if that happens?

We must recognize that the 21 million limitis desirable, – Walch said, – But if people decide to change this restriction for certain reasons, and the decision is accepted by the majority, the system will change. This is an aspiration, not a reality.

Although technically feasible, changing the limitthe proposals will almost certainly not be supported by users who value the gold-like properties of BTC. Indeed, Bitcoin's code has long been managed by a community that tends to preserve the original characteristics of the coin created by its pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto.

But sometimes the Bitcoin community still had toface governance controversies, such as the infamous scaling debate in 2017, which focused on the potential increase in Bitcoin block size. The philosophical split ultimately led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash in August 2017.

Thus, a hard fork that will change the Bitcoin limit is theoretically possible.