95% of all Bitcoin is already mined!

The last 5% will take another 114 years. Set a reminder for 2140.

So Bitcoin passed its 20 millionth coin this year. The cap is 21 million, which leaves roughly 1 million BTC still to be mined. Sounds like the finish line is close, right? Not really. The halving cuts the block reward in half about every four years, so the first 20 million took around 17 years, and the last million will drag on until roughly 2140. Your great-great-grandkids might get to see the final block. Maybe.

And out of those 20 million coins, the amount you can actually go and buy is tiny. Glassnode data suggests about 13 million BTC are basically parked forever with long-term holders, institutions and cold wallets that never move. Exchanges hold only around 3 million. And roughly 1.8 million BTC, about 8.5% of everything, is probably just gone. Forgotten passwords, wiped laptops, a hard drive someone tossed in 2011 because "it's just some internet money worth 50 cents". Pour one out for those coins.

That's why ETF and institutional buying can move the price so much. Everyone's fighting over a much smaller pile than the 20 million headline makes it sound.

The price side is where people start yelling at each other. History looks great for the bulls: about 80x after the 2012 halving, around 300% after 2016, and more than 600% in the 16 months after 2020, according to data cited by CME Group. The skeptics aren't convinced though. FT columnist Jemima Kelly argues Bitcoin isn't really scarce since thousands of other tokens exist. The usual reply is that nobody can change Bitcoin's 21 million limit, which is kind of the whole point.

We honestly think price is the least interesting thing about this milestone. Scarcity is done, that box was ticked years ago. The thing nobody has fully figured out yet is who pays for Bitcoin's security once new coins stop doing the heavy lifting. Bitcoin is exactly as safe as the money miners make, because that's what an attacker would need to outspend. Right now most of that money still comes from fresh coins, and that part gets cut in half every four years, on schedule, no exceptions. So sometime in the next decade, transaction fees have to step up and become a real chunk of miner income, or Bitcoin's security slowly gets cheaper compared to everything it protects.

Guys, what do you think about this?