On December 12, crypto advocates celebrated the fact that 90% of the 21 million bitcoins that will ever exist have been mined into circulation. Currently, Bitcoin’s inflation rate per annum is around 1.88%, which is lower than the central banks’ traditional 2% target reference. Furthermore, in 875 days, the network’s inflation rate is expected to drop to 1.1% after 19.98 million bitcoins have been mined.
Programmatic Scarcity
One benefit people enjoy about the Bitcoin network is that it is mathematical and predictable, in comparison to monetary systems issued by central banks worldwide, which are based on the whims of policymakers and are completely unpredictable. At the time of writing, 18,899,800 BTC has been mined into circulation and that equates to roughly 90% of the 21 million BTC that will ever exist. Digital currency fans acknowledged this milestone on Sunday, December 12, the same day as the 11th anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto’s official departure.
The 90% statistic can be seen on data sites like coinmarketcap.com, and Glassnode’s percentage of the bitcoin supply currently mined. The 90% of bitcoins mined into existence discussion on Reddit also led to people asking how many bitcoins are lost and stuck in unrecoverable wallets. While Bitcoin.com News recently shared a Coin Metrics 2019 report on the state of lost bitcoins, which said at least 1.5 million BTC was assumed to be lost, some Redditors estimate the number to be a whole lot more.
“Estimates of 3-5 million [bitcoin] are out there,” one Redditor explained on Sunday. “You can see onchain metrics showing how much bitcoin hasn’t moved [in the] last decade but that would be the highest possible and there are
