For Bitcoin, its price has ushered in a surge. According to data from Huobi Global, BTC rose in the short-term, breaking through the US$56,000 mark, and is now at US$56021.79. The intraday increase has reached 3.92%. The market fluctuates greatly. Please control your risks.As of press time, the price of Bitcoin has fallen, but it is still stable above $55,500.
According to data from CoinGecko, the total market value of cryptocurrencies exceeded US$2.4 trillion, with a 24-hour increase of 1.6%. Bitcoin’s market value accounted for 43.1%, and Ethereum’s market value accounted for 17.7%.
The inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, set the upper limit of the number of Bitcoins to 21 million, which means that there will always be only 21 million Bitcoins. On average, these bitcoins are introduced into the bitcoin supply at a fixed rate of one block every 10 minutes. Now the question is, what will happen if the mining is completed?
According to Andreas M. Antonopoulos, the author of a book on how Bitcoin works, the figure of 21 million is the “asymptotic upper limit of the number of existing Bitcoins.” “.
In simple terms, this means that although it may reach a level very close to this number, cryptocurrencies will never reach this limit. This is because block rewards and Bitcoin supply have never been expressed in precise terms.
Bitcoin’s code uses a shift operator-in some programming languages, an arithmetic operator that rounds the decimal point to the nearest integer. Therefore, the total supply of 6.2589 Bitcoins will be rounded to the nearest integer, which is 6 in this example.
Although this approach makes calculations easier, it will result in the loss of satoshis, the constituent unit of Bitcoin, during each block confirmation. One bitcoin is equal to 100 million satoshis. According to some people, the final Bitcoin block will be numbered 6,929,999, and the total supply at that time will be 20,999,999.9769 satoshis. Since Bitcoin uses a shift operating system, its algorithm will round this number to 20,999,999, making this cryptocurrency slightly below the target limit of 21 million.
One consequence of Bitcoin not reaching the upper limit of its plan is that it leaves the possibility of the cryptocurrency network remaining functional for a long time after 2140. Bitcoin will not be issued, but transaction blocks will be confirmed, and handling fees will become the main source of income. In the end, the Bitcoin network may become a closed economy, and the assessment of transaction costs is very similar to taxation.
In addition, block rewards and transaction fees are the most important source of income for miners-in the current setting, the former is more important than the latter. The high price of Bitcoin enables miners to pay operating costs and maintain business profits because they can sell their reward reserves in the cryptocurrency market.
When Bitcoin approaches its limit, the reward amount may not be enough to cover the miners’ operating costs, let alone generate profits. If the supply limit is reached, the bitcoin rewards should disappear.
In both cases, transaction fees are expected to fill the vacancy. The amount and mechanism of these fees depends on the state of the Bitcoin network at the time-that is, whether it is used as a medium of exchange or a store of value. The former may incur reasonable fees to enable Bitcoin to be used in daily transactions, while the latter will allow miners to conduct fewer and more expensive transactions.
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