In crypto circles people talk about the mythical maximum number of Bitcoin that will ever be minted, but that number is misleading.
Of the 21 million Bitcoin, 19.6 million have already been mined, leaving only 1.4 million Bitcoin left to be mined.
As of Wednesday, March 20, 2024 at 11 AM EST each Bitcoin is currently trading at $64,324.
That would put the value of those 1.4 million unmined Bitcoin at $90,053,600,000 billion dollars!
The reality is there actually aren’t really 21 million Bitcoin in existence, at least not anymore. Chalk that up to people who have lost access to their wallets containing Bitcoin, people who forgot they even mined or had Bitcoin when it first came out and wasn’t worth anything, or people who have passed away and never shared with their family’s their wallet’s passphrase. The list of reasons that millions of Bitcoin have been locked up and are inaccessible goes on and on.
Add to that the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is estimated to have mined between 750,000 and 1,100,000 Bitcoin – and he never sold any!
Since no one really knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and a court has ruled that Australian computer scientist Craig Steven Wright is definitely not the real Satoshi Nakamoto, the world may never know his true identity. That means an estimated $70,756,400,000 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin has been taken out of the Bitcoin ecosystem. That’s nearly 7% of Bitcoin’s total supply gone!
According to crypto analysts David Puell and James Check, they estimate that anywhere from 3.89 million to 4.87 million coins could be considered lost, or referred to as zombie coins, including Satoshi Nakamoto’s holdings. That could amount to $313,257,880,000 billion dollars of Bitcoin lost to the world.
One of the first rules of economics is the lesson of scarcity. Wikipedia says scarcity “refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good.”
For anyone that doesn’t believe in crypto, just think about what happens when some of the wealthiest people and countries in the world want something that is in limited supply and will someday stop being produced. Then consider how high the price of a single Bitcoin could reach someday.
