What happens when 21 million Bitcoins are mined?"/>

Bitcoin is similar to gold in many ways. Like gold, Bitcoin cannot bejust created arbitrarily.Gold must be mined from the ground, and cryptocurrency must be mined digitally. Associated with this process is the condition set out by the founders of Bitcoin that, like gold, cryptocurrency has a limited supply. 

Maximum amount of Bitcoin – 21 million

It is known that in the world the maximum and total amount of Bitcoin that can ever exist is 21 million.

About every four years, the amount of Bitcoin,which rewards the mining of the next block is halved: at first it was 50 BTC, then 25, and then 12.5. In 2020, this will be 6.25 BTC. Thus, if governments constantly increase their money supply, the Bitcoin algorithm acts in the opposite way, preventing inflation.

The next 3 million BTC will be sloweris mined due to the doubling of block rewards, which occurs every 210,000 blocks (or approximately four years), and reduces the supply of new Bitcoins by 50 percent. 

Currently, 18,023,662.5 Bitcoins are mined. This number changes approximately every 10 minutes when developing new blocks. Right now, every new block adds 12.5 Bitcoin to circulation.

The latest Bitcoin is expected to be mined in 2140.

Consequences of mining all Bitcoin coins 

What happens when all 21 million bitcoinswill be received? Will the system stop working, because miners will no longer receive rewards for closing blocks? But the fact is that miners also receive commissions for processing transactions, and these incomes will not go anywhere.

When will the last Bitcoin be mined?doesn't mean the network will collapse. In addition to bonuses for computing hashes, miners receive fees for processing transactions. Currently, these fees are small, on the order of a fraction of a percent, but as the reward for calculating new blocks decreases, the transaction processing fee will likely increase — along with the value of Bitcoin.

These fees should be kept at a level that continues to motivate miners, so that even though new Bitcoins stop appearing, Bitcoin miners will still get paid. 

Ability to change the amount of Bitcoin

It is actually possible to changeamount of Bitcoin cryptocurrency. If users in large numbers decide to make such changes, for certain reasons, the system will also accept this. 

Although technically feasible, changeThe coin limit will almost certainly not be good news for Bitcoin users who value its gold-like properties. After all, the Bitcoin code has long been managed by a community prone to preserving the original properties of the coin created by its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto.