According to current projections, Bitcoin is expected to reach the milestone of 19 million BTC mined within the next 23 days.
Currently 18,979,418 BTC, or 90% of the total, has been mined, implying that Bitcoin is just a stone's throw away from the 19 million mark. The number of Bitcoin in existence typically changes every 10 minutes as new blocks are mined.
Bitcoin's total supply is pegged at 21 million coins. This was set by Bitcoin's source code, programmed by its creator(s), Satoshi Nakamoto, and cannot be changed. Once all Bitcoins have been mined, the number of coins in circulation will remain constant. Despite this, the final Bitcoin is unlikely to be mined until around 2140 per several estimates.
This appears to be in line with the fact that the rate at which new Bitcoin is mined is expected to go down over time. A halving event occurs at every 210,000th block, whereby the reward for mining a Bitcoin block is halved. That happens about once every four years. Currently, the reward per block has dropped from 50 BTC in 2009 to just 6.25 BTC.
Ancient Bitcoin wallets are reawakening
According to prominent blockchain tracker WhaleAlert, a Bitcoin wallet containing 489 coins was activated for the first time since 2010. For more than 11 years, whoever held the address managed to turn a paltry $50 into $20 million by resisting the temptation to cash out.
The antique wallet has sparked a lot of speculation about whether or not its owner had enough conviction to hodl for almost a decade. The address might be traced back to the Satoshi Nakamoto Era, the enigmatic Bitcoin developer who vanished from the community in April 2011. This, of course, piqued people's attention even more.
Another dormant wallet with 407 BTC last seen active back in 2013 also came back to life, per WhaleAlert data. The owner of the wallet initially invested $355,254, which has now turned into an astonishing $15.5 million, gaining 4,266% in value.