85% of Bitcoin has been mined, and it will take another 100 years to mine all of it

On Wednesday, cryptocurrency enthusiasts took to Twitter to announce that the number of mined bitcoins has exceeded 17.85 million. This means that 85% of the total 21 million bitcoins have been mined. However, the remaining 15% will be slowly released over the next 100 years.

85% of all Bitcoins have been mined

The new block of the Bitcoin network represents the new coins being mined, and new Bitcoins are mined approximately every 10 minutes. Currently, 12.5 Bitcoins are produced per block, but by May 2020, this number will be reduced to 6.25, or "halved." The halving of mining rewards occurs every four years until only a small number of Bitcoins are produced per block.

Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto set this supply cap for his invention. Unless there is a hard fork that forces a change in the total amount, the number of Bitcoins in circulation will never exceed 21 million (interestingly, the actual number of Bitcoins is lower than 21 million due to accidents such as coin loss).

Satoshi Nakamoto never appeared in person to explain why the number 21 million was chosen, nor did he explain the concept of a supply cap, so there is a lot of speculation about it.

Dan Held, co-founder of Interchange and former founder of Uber, said the supply cap was set because Satoshi Nakamoto wanted Bitcoin to be a store of value.

Held said that Satoshi Nakamoto once talked about the commodity status of Bitcoin, so he believed that Satoshi Nakamoto would prefer to use scarcity to give Bitcoin value, making it a store of value.

Held also believes that Bitcoin was planned to be a replacement for banks, not a new version of Visa, which is why Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the news headline in the coinbase of the Genesis block. He believes that the total amount of 21 million, the 10-minute block time, and the 1MB block all support his point of view.

As to whether Satoshi Nakamoto wanted Bitcoin to be a store of value or a payment tool, there are many related debates, and we may never get Satoshi Nakamoto's standard answer.

Bitcoin to change its total volume? Don’t even think about it

It is worth noting that some people have begun to discuss the issue of increasing the total amount of Bitcoin. According to Babbitt, at the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto roundtable this year, participants discussed the possibility of increasing the total amount.

Information about the meeting is limited, even the list of attendees is unknown, and the event was held somewhere in Mexico. However, a tweet from Fold’s Matt Luongo suggests that questions were raised about the viability of deflationary Bitcoin.

Luongo explained that the Bitcoin economy can become “unstable” when the majority of miners’ revenue comes from transaction fees. He said that with fewer and fewer transactions on Bitcoin’s layer-1 (the protocol layer other than the Lightning Network and sidechains), the Bitcoin main chain is vulnerable to block reorganizations.

As such, he mentioned the possibility of lifting BTC’s long-standing supply restrictions, “allowing the Bitcoin blockchain to be secured at the expense of all holders.”

However, this proposal remains only at the proposal stage, and the Bitcoin community will not allow this to happen.