Is Bitcoin’s Printing Press Propping up the Crypto Market?
By CCN.com: The total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market is currently over $120 billion. However, studies show that billions of dollars worth of this market cap is from built-in inflation. Over the course of 2018, $15 billion in new tokens entered the supply, buttressing the overall market valuation even as prices plunged.
Bitcoin Inflation Adds Over $5 Million Per Day
An average of once every 10 minutes, 12.5 new bitcoins are added to the market. If we just call the base price $3,000, that’s $37,500. The actual amount added to the market capitalization is actually significantly higher at present, but for the sake of argument, we’ll use an easy round number. It comes to a total of $5.4 million every single day in new coins. These new coins are also miner rewards, which means that their odds of winding up on the markets are high. Miners have slim margins even when markets are doing well (because more miners participate).
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Source: Diar.co[/caption]
Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Cash don’t always hit the 10-minute block target (neither Bitcoin nor any Bitcoin fork does, either), but for the sake of argument, we’ll say they do. That’s another 1,800 coins per day each, worth a combined total of another $360,000 at current prices. From this, we can extract that the three Bitcoin variants add a minimum of $5.7 million to the market capitalization every day. Every 175 or so days, that’s $1 billion, even if the markets were frozen and no trading was conducted.
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