Why can there be more than 21 million bitcoins on the cryptocurrency market?

It is now generally accepted that the maximum supply of Bitcoin (BTC) will be 21 million coins. Of this amountalmost 18 million BTC have already been mined. However, there is an opinion that the offer of bitcoin in the future may exceed this figure.

Cryptosphere expert Eric Wall stresses that right now nothing is stopping BTC owners from expanding their offer.

By this principle, for example, is builtbanking sector activities. Financial institutions, under the supervision of regulators, transfer their assets to third parties for management. However, in fact, banks continue to control the assets transferred by them. A similar mechanism can be launched in the cryptosphere, the expert said.

How far will bitcoin's supply expand overits 21M limit in M0+ forms (M1, M2, M3)? I know examples of exchanges not being fully backed today (providing margin to big ticket clients), but curious as to whether people/payments processors will start accepting IOUs as valid payments.

- Eric Wall (@ercwl) October 4, 2019

Currently, most BTC holders prefer to store their coins in wallets. But many cryptocurrency platforms already offer services for the safe storage of bitcoins.

Coinbase and Bakkt cryptocurrency exchanges have already done so. They gain access to the management of the cryptocurrency under their storage. That is, in fact, they trade bitcoin on behalf of their customers.

This use of BTC is reminiscent of transactions with bills secured by gold deposited in a bank vault.

However, many representatives of the cryptosphere speakcategorically against the use of this scheme in relation to bitcoin. In their opinion, any form of such reservation undermines the very principle of the cryptocurrency industry. Initially, Bitcoin was created so that only the holder himself would use it without any intermediaries.

With the growing appeal of digitalMany cryptocurrency exchanges will begin to inflate the actual offer of BTC. Now exchanges process transactions with approximately 1.5 million bitcoins daily, this is only a small fraction of the total coin supply. OTC transactions are much more difficult to evaluate.

Bitcoin's capitalization exceeds $144 billion, and inper day, the amount of transactions with BTC can reach $4 billion. At the same time, some coins have never moved at all, presumably they were mined by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, the legendary creator of the first cryptocurrency.

Part of the coins was lost forever, as their customers lost the keys to their wallets. Some bitcoins just mined are held by miners to be sold on the OTC market.

So far no one has tried to issue “bills” for the right to possess such coins, but it cannot be guaranteed that such cases will not occur in the future.

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