Apparently, the global turnover of BTC is starting to decline little by little. On December 13, 2021, the system passed the milestone of 90% emission. The remaining 10% will stretch until February 2140. The issue becomes tiny, and old coins are gradually withdrawn from circulation for natural reasons:
- death of the owner;
- computer breakdown or destruction;
- forgotten password;
- failure, loss, or accidental ejection of the drive in the absence of backups;
- … etc.
There are many reasons. Drives remain operational for 20–30 years, and people for a maximum of 122 years (under normal conditions on Earth, at normal speed and gravity). If paper money is printed every year to replace damaged and lost banknotes, then such a mechanism is not provided for in bitcoin.
In principle, there is nothing wrong here. Even if the world’s BTC reserves are reduced by a thousand times, nothing prevents the introduction of three additional digits and pay in smaller units, splitting Satoshi into any number of parts. At the moment, the cost of 1 satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) is 0.042 cents or 3.1 kopecks, that is, there is still a supply. Especially on exchanges and in software, fractional units of the smallest digital assets, cents, kopecks, and satoshi are used for accuracy.
However, to predict future trends, it is useful to know where the world’s BTC is stored and what the rate of their disappearance is. That is, how many parts will have to split the remaining.
Inactive wallets
According to Glassnode statistics, the total number of wallets with non-zero balances has grown by 23.2% over the past year, which is quite a normal network growth in recent years.
The daily activity of wallets is now about 275 thousand addresses, that is, approximately in the middle between the bearish and bullish trends, but closer to the bearish one. However, this statistic is more of interest to intraday traders, since activity cycles inevitably follow each other in the long term. The picture is similar in terms of the number of transactions.
Only 24% of the coins are on active addresses – on exchanges and hot wallets. 76% of the total BTC supply is currently temporarily immobile (no movement for more than 155 days).
If we increase the period of inactivityBTC to one year, then the share of dormant coins is about 57%.
The share of dormant coins fluctuates within certain limits. However, it is clear that lost/destroyed coins fall into this category. And now their share is growing irreversibly, and in the infinitely distant future, this figure will approach 100%.
As we said, there is nothing wrong with this, because the remaining coins can be re-split into pieces without any problems. Currently, 6.3% of the total amount of BTC that is in circulation is stored on crypto exchanges. The rest lies with the users’ hot and cold wallets. There are also irrecoverable losses.
