(Natural News) A quick mathematical analysis of Bitcoin and the world of crypto-currencies: After plunging nearly 30% last week in a severe correction, Bitcoin has since surged back to the $2800 range, this time riding a wave of optimism from Bitcoin noobs in Japan and South Korea who have become irrationally convinced that Bitcoin is a replacement for their retirement savings (see Reuters report, below). Now, even kindergarten teachers are throwing money at Bitcoin, believing they've discovered a magical source of unlimited wealth (yep, they really believe it's all different this time).

Little do they know they are going to lose nearly everything when the Bitcoin end game rears its ugly head, as has already been mathematically programmed into the system. How's that, exactly?

For starters, due to increased volume, Bitcoin transactional costs have now skyrocketed from roughly $16 per transaction to $23.30 per transaction in just the past week or so, according to Blockchain.info. This is a transactional cost increase of over 30% in just a few days, and it demonstrates the stress of the increasing volume of transactions on the distributed blockchain ledger. It is yet more mathematical evidence that selling Bitcoin and exiting the market in a time of high trading volume will be increasingly expensive and difficult, with long delays on transactions that could require days or even weeks to be confirmed.

Bitcoin mining will collapse in the next few years, and the blockchain will follow

Bitcoin will approach its "end game" in the next decade when all Bitcoin mining permanently ceases due to the mathematical limit of 21 million Bitcoins in circulation. (The mining algorithm allows no more than 21 million coins to exist.) In the last 24 hours, 1,850 Bitcoins were successfully mined. This is equivalent to approximately 675,000 Bitcoins in a year, accounting for parallel increases in computational difficulty and enhancements in ASIC mining rigs that carry out hashing calculations more efficiently.

As Bitcoins are limited to a grand total of 21 million Bitcoins, and given that nearly 16.4 million Bitcoins are already mined, this means that if the current mining computational infrastructure keeps pace with the increasing mathematical difficulty for achieving Bitcoin rewards, all Bitcoins will be mined out in about seven years (by roughly 2024). (There are difficulty adjustments in the Bitcoin algorithm, so it might take longer, but Bitcoin mining is approaching an end point in the very near future.)