One of Bitcoin’s most attractive qualities is its finite supply, as the scarcity of the cryptocurrency makes for a great investment. The maximum amount of the cryptocurrency will only ever reach 21 million before becoming obsolete.

In this line, BanklessTimes.com set out to uncover just how much Bitcoin is in circulation at present and how much longer investors have to get their hands on Bitcoin.

At the time of writing there are 19,426,087 Bitcoins in circulation, meaning that there are just approximately 1,573,913 Bitcoins left to be mined. However, with blocks of Bitcoin being consistently mined, this figure changes as quickly as every ten minutes. In fact, each day there are as many as 144 blocks mined, resulting in 900 BTC entering the circulation each day.

Whilst this may seem a lot, every four years the total amount of Bitcoin mined is reduced as the number of Bitcoin mined in each block are halved. To put this in real terms, in 2012, mining a block of Bitcoin would have the award of 25 Bitcoins but today a block award would be just 6.25 Bitcoins.

Not only is there a finite supply of Bitcoin, but once the cryptocurrency is lost it cannot be retrieved. Therefore, the 3.7 million bitcoin’s that have been lost are gone forever. Thereby, around 20% of Bitcoin’s limited supply has simply vanished.

With 92.5% of the total Bitcoins available already in circulation, we would expect that Bitcoin’s mining days would soon be a thing of the past. However, experts predict it will take more than a century for us to run out of new BTC entirely.