There are now more than 19 million Bitcoins (BTC) in circulation. Just after the 19th millionth BTC was mined last Friday, the network’s difficulty hit a new all-time high of 28.587 trillion.
Hash rate on the Bitcoin network
This is evidenced by data from Blockchain.com. The difficulty of the Bitcoin network in this case correlates with the computing power required to mine Bitcoin blocks. Currently, this requires approximately 201.84 exahash per second (EH/s).
However, having a high hash rate also gives a lot of security to the network. For example, the network is better suited to double-spend attacks and it is much more expensive to perform a 51% attack, greatly reducing its likelihood.
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Last Bitcoin mined around year 2140
With just under 2 million BTC left to mine, and the increasing number of Bitcoin miners worldwide, Bitcoin’s network is expected to continue to grow. It is estimated that the last Bitcoin will be mined roughly in the year 2140, partly due to the halving system.
This halving system halves the reward for each Bitcoin block solved. Currently, anyone who solves such a block gets a reward of 6.25 Bitcoins. This is the result of the halving that took place in May 2020, before that the reward was 12.5 BTC. The next halving will take place in the year 2024, after which everyone will receive 3,125 BTC as a reward.