$BTC A recent report published by Cointele_graph revealed that nearly 19.6 million units have been mined, which is approximately 93.3% of the total supply, indicating that only 1.4 million bitcoins remain to be produced, and they will be mined at an increasing slow rate due to the halving mechanism that reduces the mining reward every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every four years.
It is noted that the maximum total supply of #bitcoin is 21 million bitcoins, a fixed limit embedded in the protocol itself, which can only be changed through a breach of consensus, which is effectively impossible under the current decentralized system. This programmed scarcity gives Bitcoin a deflationary asset characteristic, making it a constant point of comparison with gold, but with a unique advantage: the ability to accurately predict the issuance schedule.
At the beginning of 2009, the reward for each block was 50 bitcoins, leading to the rapid issuance of massive quantities in the early years, so much so that by the end of 2020, more than 87% of the total supply had been produced. Since then, the rate has decreased sharply, and it will take more than a century to issue the remaining 6.7%.
It is expected that 99% of bitcoin will be mined by 2035, but the last part, which is less than 0.001%, will take until around 2140 to complete. This is due to the exponential nature of the reward decrease, which never reaches zero but only approaches it, in a mathematical curve akin to Zeno's paradox.
Unlike gold, which increases its supply by about 1.7% annually, Bitcoin features a calculated and limited issuance schedule, granting it digital scarcity with a reliability that is not available in any other asset. In the world of finance, expected scarcity may be more valuable than mysterious scarcity.
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