Greetings friends. It’s been a busy last two weeks or so, but I wanted to get this out when I was able. One question people often ask other people who are at least somewhat knowledgeable about the crypto verse is “When do we run out of Bitcoin?” Quite the question. Once people realize that there’s only 21 million total bitcoins to go around (even though you can buy it within 8 decimal places of a whole coin) they start to wonder when the magic internet money will be depleted. It’s a very common question so I thought I’d answer it, but first we need to quickly discuss the process of halving.

So for every 210.000 blocks that have been minted and verified by other miners, a “halving” takes place. It is precisely as it sounds, the mining rewards are cut in half. So if a miner was previously receiving 6 whole bitcoins for solving a transaction, now they get only 3. Simple right? Well one of the interesting things in regards to that is that over 80% of the total bitcoin supply has already been mined. Certainly it won’t be too much longer before it’s all gone, right? Wrong.

Unless you cryogenically plan on freezing yourself in the semi-near future, the last bitcoin won’t be mined in either of our lifetimes. The math experts put the approximate timeline the last bitcoin comes into existence being in the year 2140. Yes, about 120 years into the future! But if we’ve already mined 80% of the total supply of bitcoin, why is going to take over a century to pull out that last 20%? Simply put, halving. Yes, that little thing we discussed in the previous paragraph continues to happen throughout the lifespan of bitcoin itself. Every few years less and less bitcoin comes into existence with every successfully mined transaction. As time goes on, miners will only receive fractions of bitcoin instead of entire bitcoins. This is of course by design and continues to create scarcity for the grand daddy of them all, the first crypto coin ever created, Bitcoin.

So what happens after that? Do the mining machines just turn off and that’s it? Whoever has bitcoin is rich and whoever doesn’t, isn’t? Not quite, and you should still be able to buy it in most places….for a while. The miners will still be vital for the network to function. And for every transaction they complete, they’ll actually still be rewarded bitcoin. The difference will be that those broadcasting transactions to the network as the bitcoin rewards become smaller for miners, the sender will then have to pay a higher fee to make up for the smaller reward. These will simply be seen as ever increasing network fees which people pay now anyway.

And there you have it! Not to crazy right? Pretty simple to understand. There are other alt coins out there however that are increasingly more complex and do a whole slew of different things on their perspective networks/mainnets. A discussion for another time!

Live well, stay healthy.