Jan. 13 marked a milestone for Bitcoin when 16.8 million bitcoins (BTC), or 80% of the entire Bitcoin offer, have been exploited. This means that only 4.2 million bitcoins, or 20%, are left at the mine until the 21 million bitcoin limit is reached.

BTC contains the 21 mln cap built in its protocol by Satoshi Nakamoto Paper, as a way to introduce numerical rarity to cryptocurrency. With such a cap in place, the more bitcoins are extracted, the more scarcity is important on the market.

Scarcity probably creates a demand, which in turn makes the pieces more valuable. Once 21 million bitcoins have been extracted, it becomes even more difficult to obtain them, potentially making each piece more valuable.

Miners are currently receiving a 12.5 BTC reward for each block they exploit, but Nakamoto's protocol also requires that the mining reward be halved every 210,000 blocks, or about four years. The next halving will take place in two years, roughly at the beginning of June 2020 according to the hashrate, bringing the rewards to 6.5 BTC per mined block.

Not all digital currencies are exploitable like BTC. Some cryptocurrencies are created with the entire offer released at one time, in which case the total supply is either held or in circulation and there is no way to "undermine" or "sell" it. knock new coins.

Ripple, IOTA, NEM, NEO, Qtum, Omisego, Lisk, Stratis, Waves and EOS.

Increase in the supply

Skeptics have proposed that it is theoretically possible to increase the bitcoin 21 million capped bitcoin supplies via a 51% attack or Sybil attack, but up to now none of these manipulations has proven feasible in the case of BTC.

Altcoin Krypton, based on Ethereum, experienced 51% attack in August 2016, but no other attacks of this type have occurred since then.

BTC is recovering from the December 22 market downturn, trading on average $ 14,200 and up about 4.75% over 24 hours to press time.