The Year Where It All Ends
Having a bitcoin means something like having digital gold.
There are now a bit less than 20M bitcoins in circulation, and each day, this number increases by about 500. The more bitcoins there are in circulation, the fewer bitcoins are created each day. The total number of bitcoins in circulation will never be more than 21M.
Having a bitcoin means having something very limited.
- To own a bitcoin, you can either mine it or buy it.
- Mining a bitcoin means ‘creating’ a new bitcoin.
- The ‘halving’ protocol of Bitcoin ensures that there will never be more than 21M bitcoins.
- This makes Bitcoin similar to gold: it is scarce and hard to extract.
Our first post about Bitcoin explained what Bitcoin actually is:
- Bitcoin is a digital document containing a list of all the transactions that have been made since 2009.
- To avoid having a central authority that holds the list, everyone participating in Bitcoin owns a copy of the list.
