Bitcoin crashes to $47,000 as over 90% of supply has been mined

As total Bitcoin mined reaches 90%, the price of bitcoin has continued to plunge below the ATH of $68,778.48

The price of Bitcoin has fallen by 8.03% in the past 7 days. The price declined by 3.74% in the last 24 hours. In just the past hour, the price grew by 0.88%.

The current price is $47,153.95 per BTC. Bitcoin is 31.44% below the all time high of $68,778.48.

What Bitcoin supply is telling us

The current circulating supply is 18,900,575 BTC, accounting for 90% of the total bitcoin supply of 21 million which has been mined, according to data from Blockchain.com.

The rest won’t be extracted until February 2140, at the earliest. Miners can continue to earn bitcoins till then.

Bitcoin has a proof-of-work architecture, which implies that miners compete to solve difficult math problems in order to validate transactions. It was not an easy task to attain the 90% mark, which took 12 years.

This inherent scarcity, according to industry insiders, is a key element of cryptocurrency’s attraction. “There’s a set supply but rising demand,” says Alexis Johnson, president of Light Node Media, a blockchain public relations and events firm.

According to data  from the digital asset management business CoinShares, Bitcoin use has been expanding at a rate of 113 percent per year.

The analysis claims that if people warm up to Bitcoin at the same rate as they did to the internet in its early days (or faster), there would be 1 billion users by 2024 and 4 billion users by 2030.

CoinDesk reported last month the number of new wallets worldwide increased 45% from January 2020 to January 2021, to an estimated 66 million. Popular crypto exchange Coinbase says it has now over 73 million worldwide users.