The last 5% of Bitcoin will take 100+ years

Bitcoin is down around 50% from its peak, but the more interesting story is not the price. It is the supply.

More than 95% of all Bitcoin has already been mined.

But here is the strange part:

Mining the remaining 5% will take more than 100 years.

That sounds wrong at first, but the math is simple once you understand how Bitcoin mining works.

Bitcoin releases new coins through blocks. A new block is mined roughly every 10 minutes.

Every 210,000 blocks, roughly every 4 years, the mining reward gets cut in half.

It started like this:

2009–2012: 50 BTC per block (10.5M)

2012–2016: 25 BTC per block (5.25M)

2016–2020: 12.5 BTC per block (2.625M)

2020–2024: 6.25 BTC per block (1.3125M)

2024–2028: 3.125 BTC per block (656,250)

Because each period has 210,000 blocks, the early periods created most of the supply.

So by the start of the current period, 19.6875 million Bitcoin had already been mined.

Today, roughly 20 million Bitcoin have been mined out of the 21 million maximum supply.

That is about 95%.

But the remaining Bitcoin comes out slower and slower:

3.125 BTC per block today.

Then 1.5625.

Then 0.78125.

Then 0.390625.

And so on.

The full story takes about 33 reward periods and stretches to around the year 2140.

That is the interesting lesson:

Percent complete does not always mean time complete.

Sometimes the last 5% takes longer than the first 95%.

We're solving hard problems at zinzu: https://zinzu.io

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