There is only 10% of bitcoins left to be mined, but it will take more than a century

It has only been over a decade since the first cryptocurrencies were minted and 90% of available bitcoins have already been mined. That is, almost 19 million digital currencies are currently on the open market. However, it will take more than 100 years to complete the mining of the remaining 10%, specifically until 2140.

This slowdown in the rate of mining is mainly due to the bitcoin halving schedules. Every four or so, the number of new cryptocurrencies entering the market decreases, which in turn makes mining more and more difficult. At the moment, miners get about 6.25 bitcoins for each block mined, but this figure will decrease to 3,125 bitcoins after the next reduction in 2024.

It should be noted that the global tally of 21 million minted bitcoins will never be available on the open market. According to Chainalysis estimates collected by Coindesk, millions of bitcoins have been lost forever for three reasons: first, , the father of cryptocurrency; another 3.7 million that cannot be recovered because the owners have lost their access codes; and, lastly, what corresponds to all those burned on purpose.

A man, a hard drive with millions of bitcoins and NASA

In 2013, engineer James Howells accidentally disposed of a hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins, the current equivalent of about 387 million euros. Eight years later, Howells has turned to NASA data recovery experts for help finding the missing hard drive, located somewhere in the municipal landfill in South Wales, England.

As published by Metro, Howells is willing to give the municipal authorities a quarter of the fortune (about 58 million euros) in exchange for the necessary permission to enter the landfill in search of his old hard drive, but they have also refused. Something that he considers an incompetence on the part of the City Council, since those bitcoins that are now equivalent to about 387 million euros, could be worth a billion next year.

Howells realized his mistake in 2013, when the price of bitcoin went from $150 to $1,000 and the value of his digital wallet skyrocketed to close to 5 million euros.

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