While the crypto market is once again only showing red signs, the Bitcoin network has reached an important milestone. The market update.
The sharp drop in prices from the beginning of December still runs like a red thread through the list of crypto currencies. A look at Coingecko shows: Today, December 14th, almost all crypto currencies are in the red. Regardless, the Bitcoin network is reaching an important milestone.
The largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) is quoted this morning at around 46,715 US dollars, a decline of 5.2 percent on the day. DeFi top dog Ethereum (ETH) has to cope with a price decline of 7.6 percent overnight and is currently around 3,729 US dollars.
Solana (SOL) and Polkadot (DOT) are close to the 10 percent mark with 9.3 percent and 10.5 percent, respectively, when they fell within the last 24 hours. Cardano (ADA) is currently quoted at 1.20 US dollars and has to cope with a price decline of 8.4 percent year-on-day.
It doesn’t look much better with the Memecoin faction either. Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) both recorded price drops of 5.8 percent and 6.1 percent respectively compared to the previous day.
In the top 15 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, however, Avalanche (AVAX) hit the worst. With a price drop of over 11 percent in the last 24 hours, the coin is currently trading at $ 76.94.
The Bitcoin source is drying up
As a deflationary asset, the amount of Bitcoin is limited to 21 million. If the Bitcoin network recently reached a new all-time high in terms of hashrate, a look at the coins that are still to be mined provides further insights.
Here are the crypto platform Blockchain.com according to only 10 percent of the available BTC still untouched. So currently around 18.9 million units of digital gold have already been mined.
Two different adjusting screws in the network are decisive for Bitcoin mining. On the one hand, Bitcoin halving, which occurs every 210,000 blocks, halves the reward for mined coins. This not only reduces the reward for computing power, but also the BTC that is put into circulation.
On the other hand, the mining difficulty in the Bitcoin network can adjust the difficulty of the computational problems for which a target value has to be found during mining. Recently the level of difficulty has been increased by more than 8 percent.
Despite everything, that doesn’t mean that the nearly 19 million BTC that has already been mined are available. There are many hodlers who have lost their private keys – and with them the key to their assets.