Bitcoin Cash has been hard forked since its original forking, with the creation of Bitcoin SV. Read more about the difference between Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV here. How many btc are left A significant number of bitcoins are also not in circulation. An estimated 980,000 coins, or 4.7 percent of all bitcoins that will ever exist, belong to Satoshi, according to widely accepted analysis by Sergio Demian Lerner.

However, doing so would likely result in a hard fork, meaning that a blockchain would have to be created that is separate from the original Bitcoin protocol. Ultimately, the success or failure of Bitcoin after it reaches the cap will depend in large part on whether transaction fees are high enough to keep miners around to validate transactions. But this will likely be a problem for future generations of Bitcoin investors. How many bitcoins actually exist / are lost? The miners contribute to the network behind the scenes by validating transactions to fulfill this gap. In exchange, the first miner to verify all transactions on a block in the blockchain will receive a reward — approximately 6.25 bitcoins as of writing in 2022. However, this will change over time as a result of bitcoin’s “halving.”