When Bitcoin launched in 2009, its developer, Satoshi, envisioned that there would be 21 million coins, which now forms the total expected supply of Bitcoin. These coins were to be gradually released until February 2140 via mining on the network. 

The rationale for pegging Bitcoin to a fixed supply was to create a mechanism to consistently drive the price of Bitcoin. However, as Bitcoin gained more popularity, there was a surge in the number of miners, leading to the faster than anticipated mining of Bitcoin.

90% of Bitcoin Mined in Nearly 13 Years

On Monday, December 13th, Bitcoin reached a milestone. At the time of writing, 90% of Bitcoin’s capped supply of 21,000,000 coins has already been mined – Bitcoin now has a total supply of 18,899,675 BTC.

With the first being Bitcoin mined on January 9, 2009, it has taken Bitcoin miners one month short of 13 years to mine 90% of the asset’s total supply. When all of the Bitcoins have eventually been mined, miners will depend on fees from the transactions occurring on the cryptocurrency’s network for revenue.

Validating the scarcity theory, when only 10% of the supply had been mined in early 2010, the price of Bitcoin was at $0.10. However, when 50% of Bitcoin’s total supply had been mined, it hovered over $7.50. Now, Bitcoin is trading at the $48.6k mark at the time of writing.

On the Flipside

• Despite the increasing scarcity of Bitcoin, the price of BTC remains short of price predictions for 2021, in which it was expected to hit $100k.

In addition, the number of unique addresses holding Bitcoin has also reached a new all-time high, suggesting that, more people than ever are holding Bitcoin.

Why You Should Care

Bitcoin’s limited supply will create scarcity, which is expected to drive the price of BTC to higher heights.