90% of all Bitcoin has now been mined

Bitcoin block #714,032, which was mined at 23:26 UTC, rewarded its miner with 6.25 BTC as per the current issuance schedule.

As a result of this latest emission, 90% of all bitcoin has now been mined.

The block increased the circulating supply of bitcoin to 18.9 million BTC exactly. That means there's only 10% of the anticipated total supply of 21 million coins left to be produced — a process that will take tens of years to get close to the limit.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back told The Block, "It highlights there is really not much bitcoin left to mine. Curiously the timing could not be better for the increasing hardening of bitcoin as an asset class, quantitative hardening being the antidote to runaway fiat quantitative easing via monetary supply inflation."

This milestone would have been reached 32 blocks earlier at 714,000 if all bitcoin miners had always taken the whole block reward. But since some early miners didn't claim the entire subsidy, fewer bitcoin were brought into circulation, according to Casa CTO Jameson Lopp.

While bitcoin's supply limit is set to 21 million, there are a few reasons why it won't reach exactly that number: the fact that not all rewards were claimed; the stipulation that 50 BTC created by Satoshi Nakamoto in Bitcoin's Genesis block can't be spent; and because of a few early bugs in the infrastructure.

There is also a lot of bitcoin that has been lost — with some estimates as high as 3.7 million BTC. But these coins are not technically inaccessible so they still count within the circulating supply.