Now the third subscriber in the comments asked to clarify the paradox - in just a decade of Bitcoin’s existence, 18 million coins have been mined, and the remaining 3 million (there will be a total of 21 million BTC in the world - that’s what Satoshi Nakamoto decided) will take another 120 years.

It's all about halving - the process of halving the reward for each mined block.

Let's look at the current example - now miners receive 12.5 BTC for each mined block. After the halving, the reward will be reduced to 6.25 BTC, and this will result in half as many bitcoins appearing in 10 minutes.

A total of 64 halvings are planned - two of them have already happened, and each time the number of coins over a certain time period will decrease.

Even simpler: initially the reward was 50 BTC per block. We multiply this amount by the number of blocks (halving occurs every 210,000 blocks) and we get 10.5 million BTC. This is how many coins were mined before the 2012 halving.

Then the reward dropped to 25 BTC - and over the next 210,000 blocks, the total reward was 5.25 million. And so on down the slope!

That’s why everything drags on so much, but it’s not interesting any other way😉

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