Highlights:

The Bitcoin Market Circulation will hit 18 million in three days

This means that only 3 million more coins will be mined for the next 160 years until 2174

Market capitulation is said to be affected by this milestone

By the end of this week, the net volume of Bitcoin tokens available for mining will further shrink to only three million. That’s after the 18,000,000th token enters circulation in just about three days from now, marking an important milestone for the asset months before the next halving event.

The Proof of Work will not be that sustainable. Miners will turn to mine altcoins for more reasonable cost and rewards. Finally, POW cryptos will be more and more centralized and fading down. Proof of Stake is the future. That is evolution. — Idea Nakamoto (@IdeaNakamoto) October 14, 2019

Since hitting the all-time-high figure of 108.5 million TH/s earlier on Sep 26, the network hashrate has largely remained north of 100 million TH/s barring temporary dips every now and then. That’s a gain of over 150% as compared to Jan 1, 2019, when the corresponding figure stood at just under 42 million TH/s.

A higher hashrate indicates rising activity and processing power on the Bitcoin network. As for the root cause behind this spike, it’s hard to pinpoint any one particular reason. But judging by market dynamics and various other factors at play, it is possible that the spike in network activity is partly due to the arrival of next-generation mining rigs.