With less than 5% of BTC left to mine, Bitcoin confirms its programmed scarcity. Unlike other blockchains with changing monetary rules, Bitcoin remains faithful to its original protocol. This stability reinforces its unique position: a non-manipulable digital asset, designed to counter inflation and censorship.
95% of BTC has already been mined—as expected, it is becoming scarce.
It is important to remember that Bitcoin is unique among digital and even physical assets: its monetary policy is immutable, transparent, and its exchanges are obviously resistant to censorship.
Whereas many blockchains regularly adjust their economic rules (modifying the issuance, operation, and use of the token), Bitcoin is based on a code that is almost ossified and audited. No single player can impose a change without the explicit agreement of the entire network.
It is precisely this robustness that has enabled Bitcoin to guarantee a maximum supply of 21 million units since its creation. This is a certainty that few other cryptocurrencies can offer.
Today, the limit of 95% of the maximum quantity of bitcoins has been reached, or nearly 19.96 million BTC. Only about 1.04 million BTC remain to be mined, a growing scarcity inscribed in time, until the last issuance scheduled between 2130 and 2140.
But the scarcity perceived by the market is actually even greater, with an estimated 3 to 4 million BTC permanently lost due to lost or destroyed private keys.
Added to this are the famous BTCs of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin: approximately 1.125 million BTCs, mined in the early months of the network and never moved since.
The majority of the community considers these BTCs to be out of circulation forever. Taking these losses into account, the actual available supply could fall to around 16 million BTC, or even less.
What if someone stole Satoshi’s BTC?
Although the 1.125 million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto are considered permanently lost, some Bitcoiners believe that there is a slim chance that they may one day be found.
Two scenarios are regularly mentioned:
The first is based on a lack of entropy when generating private keys in the early days of Bitcoin. If the private key generation algorithm used by Satoshi lacked randomness, then well-equipped attackers could, in theory, recover some of these keys using brute force.
The second scenario involves quantum cryptography. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break classic cryptographic algorithms, such as ECDSA, used by Bitcoin to secure private keys. This type of threat is still very theoretical, but it raises an existential question for all systems based on current cryptography, as Bitcoin would not be the first victim of such computers.
