It’s official: 4 out of 5 bitcoins have already been mined

This weekend saw a major milestone passed for the cryptocurrency community with the mining of the 16,800,000th bitcoin. As the bitcoin protocol is hard-capped at a fraction under 21 million coins, this means 80 percent of the world’s total supply is already out in the wild. We’re not about to run out of bitcoin next weekend, so don’t lose your cool just yet. The math that introduces new coins into the ecosystem gets progressively difficult as time goes on; we’re making bitcoins more slowly, not more quickly When it first cropped up nine years ago, bitcoin’s unremarkable monetary value reflected how easy it was to generate. Nowadays that math is…