19M Bitcoins are mined but did you know about the last Bitcoin mined?

[1miau]

Recently, Bitcoin number 19,000,000 was mined and it's a huge milestone for Bitcoin.
Only 2M BTC are left until all 21,000,000 BTC will be mined, which will happen in 2140.

Even the next 1,000,000 BTC will only take 4 more years to be mined as calculated here:

Currently, there are issued around 900 BTC per day: 6 Blocks per hour (10 min per Block) = 6 * 6.25 = 37.5 BTC per hour = 37.5BTC/h * 24h = 900BTC per day
To mine 1 Million BTC at that rate (1.000.000BTC / 900BTC/day), we would need 1,111 days (3.04 years).

We have 2 years left until Block rewards are halved again, to 3,125 BTC per Block, so it would be 2 years in our current halving cycle + 2 years in the next halving cycle (which we need to double because rewards are halved).
So it will take 4 years until we have mined 20M BTC, which will happen in 2026.

So, for the last 1,000,000 BTC, it will take almost 120 years to be mined.


For the last Bitcoin, it's even more impressive:

The last Bitcoin will need more than 34 years to be mined. Yes, a single BTC will take 34 years to be mined!
It will start around 2106 and take until 2140 until the last BTC is mined.
That's a timespan larger than Bitcoin has existed so far. It's twice as long (Bitcoin has existed for 14 years now).
The last Bitcoin will take the same time than the first approx. 20,960,000 Bitcoins to be mined.

Here's a visualisation:



Of course, Miners will be rewarded by transaction fees by then.

But it's impressive to see how mining rewards will decrease. 

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[Upgrade00]

Those are quite impressive numbers, and many of us (actually all of us) can only imagine how Bitcoin would exist then and how people would interact with it, as we would not be there to witness it.

The last Bitcoin will need more than 34 years to be mined. Yes, a single BTC will take 34 years to be mined!
It will start around 2106 and take until 2140 until the last BTC is mined.

How much impact would mining rewards and halving have on the market then, when about 99% have already been mined and the remaining yet to be mined would not affect the market much.

Of course, Miners will be rewarded by transaction fees by then.

This is also a topic with many uncertainties about how motivated miners would be at that time to invest in mining rigs and electricity.

[1miau]

The last Bitcoin will need more than 34 years to be mined. Yes, a single BTC will take 34 years to be mined!
It will start around 2106 and take until 2140 until the last BTC is mined.

How much impact would mining rewards and halving have on the market then, when about 99% have already been mined and the remaining yet to be mined would not affect the market much.

Interesting question and in my opinion, it's very difficult to predict.
But I would expect that the Block rewards will only make up a very small percentage of miner rewards and therefore, halvings would only have symbolic status.


Currently, transaction fees are 1 to 2 percent of the current mining revenue:


https://stats.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fees-percent-of-reward/

Way after 2050, I expect the opposite like 1-2% block rewards and 98% transaction fees, going more extreme until 2140. But we have lightning of course, leading to uncertainties in my prediction.
The important part of mainly transaction fees as miner rewards would be that these fees (BTC) are already in circulation in opposite to block rewards, which are newly issued.

[franky1]

there wont be 21mill. as the topic creators images show only 20,999,999.9769

Recently, Bitcoin number 19,000,000 was mined and it's a huge milestone for Bitcoin.
Only 2M BTC are left until all 21,000,000 BTC will be mined, which will happen in 2140.
..
Of course, Miners will be rewarded by transaction fees by then.

But it's impressive to see how mining rewards will decrease.  

making the date from the 20,999,998 to 20,999,999 being the 'last whole bitcoin'
dates of after 2096-before2104 (under 8 years to make a final whole bitcoin)

so we only have 74 years not 117 years until the last WHOLE bitcoin
..
we also have the average TX fee combined per block of 0.07btc (10btc/144 blocks(a day))
by which if fee's remain at this same level. then the reward will be equal in about 2045 (23 years time)


in the next 23-76 years, fee's will be the significant income.
so before 2045 we should not be trying now to make bitcoin more expensive to "compensate miners" due to their reward decreases now.. instead we should be making bitcoin cheap fee for people to use bitcoin more. and enjoy bitcoin more to gain more adoption of THE BITCOIN NETWORK(not side projects/networks pretending to be bitcoin but dont involve mining)

NOW we should be increasing the amount of transaction capacity on THE BITCOIN NETWORK(not on side networks that have no mining)

so that more can use and enjoy bitcoin now, and so that the fee's can be spread even further across more users, thus keeping fee's reasonable individually,. so that as things grow later. the fee's stay low individually but amass collectively per block to afford miners a good bonus/income from

..
alot of people think we have 117 years to worry about miners getting paid via fees... wrong
alot of people think we have 23 years before even worrying, deciding about miners fee's. wrong
some idiots think we need to ruin bitcoins utility by making it expensive now, to compensate miners now.. wrong
we need to grow utility now, to then create the buffer and the potential for the future to not suddenly hit us

[Poker Player]

Well no, I didn't know about the latest Bitcoin to be mined, and I appreciate this kind of threads to acquire more knowledge about the nature of Bitcoin little by little.

We can never be 100% sure if the Bitcoin will exist then, or if it will have been replaced by some other digital coin, or if the world will have disappeared by then, due to a nuclear cataclysm or something similar, but everything indicates that if things continue as they are now, with governments with an unstoppably increasing spending trend, with fiat currencies increasingly devalued and with the Bitcoin being more and more acquired and used by the population, by the time the last Bitcoin is mined, whoever has a fraction of Bitcoin will be rich.

It is a question of supply and demand, scarcity and production.

[buwaytress]

No more merits or I'd shove them around, but yes, technically, franky's right. The final coin will actually never be mined, so it's the penultimate coin that's more predictable.

Not sure I can ever contribute useful thoughts to how the Bitcoin economy can remain interesting for miners at that stage but I do agree that utility is probably a huge part of any future solution. It's a likelihood we'll get to see some significant upgrade or change to Bitcoin's algorithm in our life time (or my life time anyway), but we'd definitely need to continue the trend of increasing utility to motivate that.

[Charles-Tim]

How much impact would mining rewards and halving have on the market then, when about 99% have already been mined and the remaining yet to be mined would not affect the market much.

If miners are 99% depending on transaction fee and 1% depending on mining reward, that means miners are depending on transaction fee already. At start, miniers got 50BTC for mining a block, which increases bitcoin supply in circulation. Increase supply will have reduction price effect on price. After every halving, the mining reward is reducing every 210000 blocks. The reducing mining reward will result to increasing bitcoin price because if the supply is not reduced, the price couldn't be as high as it is. Because of this, people fomo during halving as the supplying is getting reduced and buy during the time. Probably this may become a fomo event in the future as it is happening now, people may take halving as a period of buying. If the supply is reduced, with more adoption and fiat devaluation, definitely there would be more increase in bitcoin price.

with fiat currencies increasingly devalued and with the Bitcoin being more and more acquired and used by the population, by the time the last Bitcoin is mined, whoever has a fraction of Bitcoin will be rich.

I can not doubt this at all, fiat will always depreciate, an advantage for higher bitcoin price. Taking gold as an example, gold reached $678 in 1980, gold reached all-time-high ($2075) in 2020. According to officialdata.org, the buying power of gold at $678 in 1980 has the same buying power of $2142 in 2020. Although people are buying gold but yet getting supplied by gold miners, the valuation in gold is more in fiat valuation. The amount of chocolate gold can purchase in 1980 is still almost the same amount the same amount of gold would purchase in 2022, but getting value in fiat depreciation. This also would help in bitcoin price valuation, definitely.

[Ale88]

Not sure I can ever contribute useful thoughts to how the Bitcoin economy can remain interesting for miners at that stage but I do agree that utility is probably a huge part of any future solution.

Do you mean why the miners should still validate transactions at that point? Well, the fees they'll earn should be more than enough as incentive since bitcoin will be extremely rare, and people will be talking about satoshis by that time because the value, probably, will be extremely high.

[OgNasty]

People tend to be surprised by this, but it isn't as fantastic as it sounds.  I'm reminded of the saying that if you travel halfway to your destination each day, you will never arrive there.  That's sort of how Bitcoin block rewards are issued.  They keep getting cut in half, which makes it sound a little "fantastic" when you look at only the final date.  The last few reward cycles are pretty small though.  Likely tx fees would make up a lion's share of the block reward at that point and the reward itself would be a secondary thought as it reduces itself to near nothing. (Maybe, I guess we'll see what the price does.  Well, I won't but maybe someone else will live that long.)

[mikeywith]

How much impact would mining rewards and halving have on the market then, when about 99% have already been mined and the remaining yet to be mined would not affect the market much.

Mining rewards have little to no impact on the market now, let alone then, it's often thought that selling pressure from miners brings the price down or the opposite, but IMO that is far from correct, the mining rewards are just a fraction of the trading volume, the supply from "elsewhere" is A LOT greater than what miners get as mining rewards, and as more and more coins leave the hands of miners to non-miners, this little impact miners have over the market slowly diminishes until it becomes completely irrelevant.

This is also a topic with many uncertainties about how motivated miners would be at that time to invest in mining rigs and electricity.

As long as there is any sort of profit to be made "big or small" some miners will still run their gears, in fact, even if running mining gear results in a loss, many people will still mine just to keep the blockchain alive (self-interest for them to be able to send and receive bitcoin), but the bigger issue would be the blockchain's security.

if the incentives to run a mining gear don't exist -- the network becomes more prone to attacks, so bitcoin's security as it stands right now is closely related to its value, the more expensive it gets the more secured it becomes, hopefully, that will change one day when the majority of people start using and protecting bitcoin rather than just mining it for profit.

[Upgrade00]

if the incentives to run a mining gear don't exist -- the network becomes more prone to attacks, so bitcoin's security as it stands right now is closely related to its value, the more expensive it gets the more secured it becomes, hopefully, that will change one day when the majority of people start using and protecting bitcoin rather than just mining it for profit.

That's exactly what I was talking about in my reply.
If there is not enough inventive to mine Bitcoins, then it creates a security risk as more people could be less motivated to switch on their rigs, resulting in less hashrate and security.

The alternative is Bitcoin rises to make tx fees more expensive, enough to motivate people to actually invest in mining, but this eojmg affect the general users as transacting would be more expensive and holders would be demotivated to actually send bitcoins.

[KingsDen]

Many things will surely change when the last bitcoin will be mined. Bitcoin network may not remain the same:
1. Some miners will loose interest in the bitcoin network which may also mean that bitcoin network may be weak
2. Transaction fees will be high which may push people to other layers of transaction as LN.
3. The government accusations of Bitcoin energy consumption will become very meaningless.
4. Bitcoin will become less volitile because demand and supply will become somewhat stable.
5. The price of bitcoin will be high and will remain high there.
6. There will be bitcoin hardfork because some developers will propose to create more bitcoins and some will disagree. Which will result to something like Bitcoin SV

[Asiska02]

As more bitcoins are been mined yearly, and the amount of bitcoin been mined is reduced by half after every four years. Now bitcoin hasn’t spent half of the total year needed for the complete bitcoin to be mined, and almost all the bitcoin as already been mined. People are joining into mining everyday, I just can’t imagine how competitive it will be mining the last bitcoin and how it will have effect on the market. Many of us if not all won’t witness the last bitcoin mined.

[kryptqnick]

Wow, I'm sure it's the sort of info one could come up with, using school-level Math calculations, but I had no idea the last Bitcoin would be mined for 34 years! I knew, of course, of halving, but I didn't know that one coin would take this long. Then again, a few people pointed out that the last Bitcoin will never be mined, and that thus much less time is needed to finish mining than anticipated, which is also something I didn't know. Investopedia says the number of BTC "will likely never reach 21 million". Does it mean that it's unclear and different opinions can be equally grounded regarding this question?

[1miau]

Wow, I'm sure it's the sort of info one could come up with, using school-level Math calculations, but I had no idea the last Bitcoin would be mined for 34 years! I knew, of course, of halving, but I didn't know that one coin would take this long. Then again, a few people pointed out that the last Bitcoin will never be mined, and that thus much less time is needed to finish mining than anticipated, which is also something I didn't know. Investopedia says the number of BTC "will likely never reach 21 million". Does it mean that it's unclear and different opinions can be equally grounded regarding this question?

For the 20,999,999.9769 number: the explanation of the missing sats are technical reasons like rounding down issued sats per block at some point, here's a very good article describing it: https://blog.amberdata.io/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-never-reach-21-million

One thing to note here is that, because the Bitcoin developers decided to use a bit-shift operator to half the rewards each year (which makes sense since bitcoins are not infinitely divisible into satoshis), the reward is not exactly cut in half each year, but instead it is rounded down to the smallest integer each time. For example:

    at block 2,100,000 the reward would have been 4,882,812.5 satoshis, but it will be instead only 4,882,812 satoshis (rounded down)
    at block 2,310,000 the reward would have been 2,441,406.25 satoshis, but it will be instead only 2,441,406 satoshis (rounded down)
    and so on for each halving afterwards

Based on this data, the last reward (1 satoshi) will be granted at block 6,929,999 on February 23rd of 2140, and the total supply at that time will be 20,999,999.9769 Bitcoins.

https://blog.amberdata.io/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-never-reach-21-million

In addition, there have been various trivial incidents from individual miners meanwhile, that the total number of Bitcoin will be even lower. That part ist also explained in the article.
It's also possible that more of such incidents could follow.

[mildmanneredsuffering]

its not mined coins being sold that have created the mathematical dlimna that btc finds itself in today.

Its ledgers selling btc that have never been mined and do not exist as utxos that is the conundrum Somebody or the sum of bodies broke bitcoin. there are more than 21 million being sold and they aint on the btc network

[mildmanneredsuffering]

the lazy answer to who is selling so much off network inifite supply btc would be the same answer to the question

what shady exchange became massive trading an sql ledger of infinite btc?

[mildmanneredsuffering]

and the grand finale to this mysterious supply of infinite btc

ETH is better than btc because exchange is handled on ledger via dex

but eth is still not the best


Fixed supply on ledger exchange layer 1 is the pinnacle of our encrypted trustless and secure economic system.

Bitcoin is dead

long live the fixed supply encrypted distributed ledger with high speed on chain exchange

[oudomopo]

Pretend that we are in 2026, 20 million BTC's have been mined. 1 million bitcoins are out there somewhere. The time that the last 1 million bitcoins would be mined is 114 years from now. (118 years in the present.) I can predict that 20.5 million bitcoins would be mined by 2030. Now, you will see something change. 2022-2026 is a 4 year gap, which means that it would take at least 4 years to mine the 20th millionth bitcoin, or it would take 4 years to mine 1 million bitcoin. That would be in 2026. In 2024, bitcoin's mining reward would decrease for the 5th time. After 2026, there would be another halving 2 years later. The next 4 year gap is 2026-2030. The time would take to mine bitcoin in the 2026-2030 4 year gap is 500,000 BTC. Why? Because every 4 years, Bitcoin mining rewards would be halved. In 2028, there would be another bitcoin mining reward decrease for the 6th time. By 2030, Bitcoin's circulating supply is projected to be 20.5 million bitcoin. Then 2 years later, there would be another mining reward decrease. The year would be 2032. In 2036, my projection of bitcoin's circulating supply would be around 20.75 million bitcoin. That would be at least like 250,000 BTC mined in 4 years. After this, it would keep repeating all the way until 2108-2140, where the world turned their attention to the last bitcoin to be mined.







Deleted my previous post since not enough information.

[Kakmakr]

We are entering a very interesting phase of our Bitcoin experiment, where we will soon see if "Miners fees" will be sufficicient for miners to continue mining. We all know that the Lightning Network is way better for people to use, because the fees are much lower and the transactions are much faster.

Now, what will happen if the Lightning Network adoption increase so much, that we hardly get any transactions on-chain? Will the few transactions being done on-chain be enough to reward miners? (We hope that the price will go up, so that the few Satoshi's are worth the hashing power used to get it)