12th December 2021 marks the day on which Bitcoin miners celebrated the issuance of a 90% supply cap of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is reaching its end supply limit of 21 Million with a yearly 1.88% rate of inflation. It is furthermore anticipated that while Bitcoin will reach 20 Million of its supply, the inflation rate will automatically come down to 1.1%.
One of the most intriguing facts about the network of Bitcoin is that it is based on math. On the contrary, the usual financial system is not simple math but also the predictions can go either way. In addition, financial system other than crypto is driven by people known as “policymakers” while Bitcoin is free from “centralization”.
Similarly, national currencies can be printed limitlessly. With regard to Bitcoin, however, the supply of Bitcoins is restricted and cannot exceed 21 million coins. On 12th December (Sunday), 2021, Bitcoin miners got to see the landmark achievement for Bitcoin. They noticed that Bitcoin reached exactly 90% of its supply cap which means that 18,899,800 have been sent into the market. The day reminded crypto supporters of another important part of history linked with Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. It was the day when Nakamoto was last seen on social media and then vanished.
Bitcoin’s reaching 90% of its total supply was also noticed by a number of crypto trading platforms and social media websites. Many of them celebrated the event while social media covered this aspect in the headlines. Now there is only 10% of Bitcoins are left to be mined and brought into the market.
Then there are at least 1.5 million Bitcoins that haven’t been accessed for long. It seems impossible that anyone could sneak into these 1.5 million Bitcoins. As a matter of fact, these 1.5 million Bitcoins are in fact those which been lost because the owners lost access keys. This figure of 1.5 million could be wrong as has been suggested by Coin Metrics 2019. But to Redditors, 1.5 million is not the correct figure and in fact, the figure is greater than that.
Currently, there are two kinds of idle Bitcoins i.e. those which have been lost and those which haven’t been accessed deliberately. This second category of Bitcoiners is of those who though have access keys with them but haven’t logged into their accounts for a very long time. Some of the Bitcoin wallets haven’t been used for more than a decade. According to Redditor though, the number of lost Bitcoins is way higher than 1.5 million. In fact, the Redditor claimed that the lost Bitcoins could be more than 3 million.
It is however difficult to determine exactly how many coins were lost because of the non-availability of access keys.