Bitcoin achieves major milestone with 700,000th block 🎉

Hooray, hooray, hooray! Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, registered its 700,000th block today! September 11, 2021. Hooray!

At the moment, 89.58% of the total supply has already issued. The total number of coins currently in circulation is 18.812 million. It took the leading cryptocurrency 693 days to reach the next milestone after registering 600,000 blocks on October 19, 2019. At that time, bitcoin's price on the Bitstamp exchange closed at $7,960. The cryptocurrency is currently $44,835, which is 463% higher than the day the 600,000th block was registered.

On average, new blocks are generated about every 10 minutes, but it is impossible to predict exactly how long it will take to create one block. When extraction complexity is too high, block production can slow significantly. According to U.Today, it took nearly 122 minutes to mine one block, the longest block mining time in nearly a decade. After Chinese miners began shutting down their equipment earlier this year due to the country's crackdown on the industry, the average time required to mine a block increased to nearly 13 minutes before the largest negative complexity adjustment in bitcoin history.

Beginning May 11, 2020, miners receive a reward of 6.25 BTC for each valid block. A quadrennial event, during which the Bitcoin issue rate decreases by 50 percent, occurs after every 210,000th block.

How many blocks are left?

Although Bitcoin is limited to only 21 million coins, there is no maximum number of blocks that can be created on a blockchain. The chain will get longer even after all the coins are mined, which is expected to happen around 2140. Miners will continue to add new blocks to the chain to validate transactions and earn rewards. Thus, as long as people keep transferring new coins, new blocks will be added to the chain.

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