It is now believed that the maximum amount of Bitcoin (BTC) offers will be 21 million coins. Of this amount, nearly 18 million BTC have already been mined. However, there is an opinion that the offer of bitcoin in the future may exceed this figure.
Cryptosphere expert Eric Wall stresses that right now nothing is stopping BTC owners from expanding their offer.
For example, the banking sector is being built on this principle. Financial institutions, under the supervision of regulators, transfer their assets to third parties for management. However, in fact, banks continue to control the assets transferred by them. A similar mechanism can be launched in the cryptosphere, the expert said.
How far will bitcoin's supply expand over its 21M limit in M0 + forms (M1, M2, M3)? I know examples of exchanges not being fully backed today (providing margin to big ticket clients), but curious as to whether people / payment processors will start accepting IOUs as valid payments.
– Eric Wall (@ercwl) October 4, 2019
Currently, most BTC holders prefer to store their coins in wallets . But already many cryptocurrency platforms offer services for the safe storage of bitcoins.
Coinbase and Bakkt cryptocurrency exchanges have already done so . They gain access to the management of the cryptocurrency under their storage. That is, in fact, they trade bitcoin on behalf of their customers.
This use of BTC is reminiscent of transactions with bills secured by gold deposited in a bank vault.
However, many representatives of the cryptosphere strongly oppose the use of this scheme in relation to bitcoin. In their opinion, any form of such reservation undermines the very principle of the cryptocurrency industry. Initially, Bitcoin was created so that only the holder himself would use it without any intermediaries.
Given the growing attractiveness of digital currency, many crypto exchanges will begin to inflate the actual offer of BTC. Now exchanges process transactions with approximately 1.5 million bitcoins daily, this is only a small fraction of the total coin supply. OTC transactions are much more difficult to evaluate.
Bitcoin's capitalization exceeds $ 144 billion, and the amount of transactions with BTC can reach $ 4 billion per day. However, some coins never moved at all, presumably they were mined by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, the legendary creator of the first cryptocurrency.
Part of the coins was lost forever, as their customers lost the keys to their wallets. Some bitcoins just mined are held by miners to be sold on the OTC market.
So far no one has tried to issue “bills” for the right to possess such coins, but it cannot be guaranteed that such cases will not occur in the future.
Publication date 10/07/2019
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