Bitcoin Monetary Supply And Inflation Rate
By Raffael Kuhn on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
SCX | Crypto Insights #1
18 million Bitcoins have been mined and only 3 million are left to mine.
Many cryptocurrency networks use inflation to mint new tokens and reward certain users for completing specific tasks. In the Bitcoin network, miners are incentivized to mine blocks due to the potential of earning transaction fees from users and more importantly the block reward. The Bitcoin block reward is currently 12.5 BTC and is on pace to halve in May 2020 (the estimated date fluctuates) to 6.25 BTC. The number of bitcoins generated per block decreases geometrically, with a 50% reduction in bitcoin creation every 210,000 blocks, or approximately every four years. As a result, the number of bitcoins ever in existence will not exceed 21 million.
As a result, the inflation rate of Bitcoin is also decreasing every time a new block has been mined. The inflation rate is currently around 3.6% and it will decrease to about 1.8%. As a comparison, the gold supply grows around 1.6% per year. In other words, gold has a stock-to-flow ratio of around 62. Which means that it takes 62 years of production to get the current gold stock. Bitcoin's stock-to-flow ratio is around 30, which still halves the ratio of gold. But around the year 2022, Bitcoin’s stock-to-flow ratio will overtake that of gold. We will see what effects this has on the price of Bitcoin.
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