📎 Bitcoin: what will happen when miners get all the coins?

The number of coins of the first by capitalization cryptocurrency is limited — sooner or later, bitcoin will "run out". And the more people start mining, the more often the question arises: what will happen then?

Bitcoin's source code contains 21 million cryptocurrency units. One block containing coins is mined every ten minutes. Given the amount of mining equipment, it would seem that miners should have mined all of the available cryptocurrency long ago, but the rate is fixed thanks to halving — the number of bitcoins released in each block decreases by 50% every four years.

According to the data, more than 18 million bitcoins have been mined today. It took nearly a decade to get that many coins. About 20% of that number of cryptocurrency units are in wallets that are no longer accessible — the owners have forgotten their passwords and thrown away their hard drives. And the more bitcoin's value increased, the more people tried to regain access to their investments — for example, Wallet Recovery Services, a company dedicated to recovering lost digital wallet keys, has seen a steady increase in appeals from wallet holders over the past few years.

There are 3 million coins left — and that should spur anyone interested in cryptocurrency. It seems like we're at the finish line — but bitcoin mining is a little more complicated than that. Let's not forget about halving: at the launch of bitcoin, the reward for mining it was 50 bitcoins. In 2012, it was reduced to 25 coins. The next phases of halving occurred in 2016 to 12.5 bitcoins, and in 2020 to 6.25 bitcoins.

The size of the reward will be halved every four years, until the last bitcoin is received. But presumably it won't be available until 2140 at the earliest. And now it is impossible to claim that the cryptocurrency network protocol will not be changed until then.

⚡️ It is likely that the mining process will go through a big transformation, and the limited number of coins will be just one of the levers triggering the process of change. Even in recent years, the industry has taken big steps forward, which means that there are still many discoveries, innovations, inventions that we cannot imagine right now.