When, if ever, will "peak bitcoin" occur? My (limited) understanding of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is that the costs of &quot;mining&quot; bitcoins was quite low in the early days, and the limiting factor in how fast they were mined was the small number of people who had the infrastructure to do so.  As time went on, however, the algorithms for mining bitcoins made it harder and and harder to get a new bitcoin in this way, and it is now rather difficult for anyone but the most serious miners to successfully mine a new coin.
This description of bitcoin's history makes it sound like an awful like a normal commodity such as crude oil:  it's easy to get the first barrels out of the ground, when there's not much capacity to do so;  but it gets harder as time goes on.  The net result (according to Hubbert, at least) is that there is a peak in the extraction rate of the commodity.  This is often referred to as &quot;peak oil&quot; in the case of crude oil.
Has anyone done a similar analysis to find out when &quot;peak Bitcoin&quot; or &quot;peak Etherium&quot; or what-have-you will occur?  In other words, in what year will the rate at which new bitcoins are being mined reach its peak?  Has this happened already?  Or is there something about cryptocurrencies that make them immune to these sorts of effects?
At the beginning of Bitcoin, every newly mined block (about every 10 minutes) creates 50 bitcoins. This is called the block subsidy. About every 4 years, this number cuts in half. Therefore, the peak extraction rate was about the first 4 years of Bitcoin's existence.
In fact, it was from 3 January 2009 to 28 November 2012.
The block reward includes both the block subsidy, and the transaction fees of transactions included in the block, so miners still get bitcoins, but they are not newly &quot;extracted&quot; bitcoins, they are bitcoins that someone else has paid.
Note that one block is mined about every 10 minutes. The number of miners is irrelevant. The speed of the miners is irrelevant. The system automatically adjusts itself so that one block is mined about every 10 minutes. That is the only reason why mining requires a lot more computational power than it used to - you are competing with a lot more people.