On the night of March 9-10, 2026, a quiet but historic moment will take place – the 20th millionth bitcoin will be born. Sounds like dry statistics? Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a milestone that perfectly reveals BTC’s brilliant and ruthless economics. Since almost all BTC has already been mined, will it take a short time to mine the rest? You may be surprised here too!
95.2% of the supply is already in people’s hands. What about the rest?
Bitcoin has a built-in hard limit: more than 21 million coins will never be created. Now 20 million of them are already in circulation. Sounds like a lot? It is this last million-dollar pool, i.e. just 4.8%, that the market will compete for for the next… 114 years. This is how the halving mechanism works, i.e. the cyclical reduction of the reward for miners by half every approx. 4 years. The next halving is already behind us (April 2024), the next one is expected in 2028. With each halving, new BTCs enter the market slower and slower – the supply literally slows down.
Bitcoin scarcity as a foundation of value
Moreover, the actual available supply is even lower than the numbers suggest. It is estimated that 3 to 4 million BTC were irretrievably lost – forgotten passwords, destroyed drives, lost private keys. Just like the story of a British programmer who has been looking for his bitcoin disk in a landfill for years.
In addition, there is approximately 1 million BTC belonging to Satoshi himself, which has not moved for years. In practice, the active, “liquid” supply may amount to as little as 14-15 million BTC.
What does this mean for miners and for us?
As the block reward decreases, miners’ revenues become increasingly dependent on transaction fees. This forces the entire ecosystem to mature, as the network must be used to be profitable to maintain. Paradoxically, the fewer new BTCs there are, the more important each existing one is. Reaching the 20 million mark is not only a curiosity for crypto geeks, but above all a hard reminder that bitcoin works exactly as it was designed.
Time to make another million has officially become a luxury the world will wait over a century for.
