HOW MANY BITCOIN EXIST
20,081,156 EXIST · 918,844 STILL TO COME
There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoin. Almost all of them already exist. The rest come out slowly, a few every ten minutes, for the next hundred years.
- MADE SO FAR
- 20,081,156 BTC
- STILL TO COME
- 918,844 BTC
- THE LIMIT
- 21,000,000 BTC
- SHARE ALREADY MADE
- 95.62 %
- MADE PER BLOCK NOW
- 3.125 BTC
- BLOCK RIGHT NOW
- 965,970
WHERE COINS COME FROM
Every ten minutes someone builds a block, and Bitcoin pays them 3.125 new coins for it. That payment is the only place a bitcoin has ever come from.
There is no mint and no press. Nobody can decide to make more. If a miner writes themselves a bigger payment, every computer on the network throws that block away, however much electricity went into it.
That is the whole story of where coins come from. They appear at the top of a block, and nowhere else.
WHY 21 MILLION
The limit is not a promise. It is a rule, and rules here are checked by everybody.
It is also not really a number someone picked. It falls out of the halving. The pay starts at 50 coins and is cut in half every 210,000 blocks. Add up that whole staircase and it stops just under 21 million. The limit is what the schedule adds up to.
Satoshi never explained why 21 and not 42. What he did explain is why a limit at all: every money before this one was ruined by whoever was allowed to make more of it.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY RUN OUT
The last one is made at block 6,930,000, around the year 2140.
After that, whoever builds a block is paid only by the fees of the payments inside it. Nothing else changes. Blocks keep coming, every computer keeps checking, and no new coins appear.
One thing the count does not know: coins that are lost. Keys get thrown out, drives get wiped, people die. Those coins are still inside the 20,081,156 above, because the network cannot tell a lost coin from a coin that someone is simply not moving. Nobody can.
QUESTIONS
How many bitcoin are there right now?
20,081,156, out of a limit of 21,000,000. That is 95.62 % of every bitcoin that will ever exist.
How many bitcoin are left to mine?
918,844. They arrive at 3.125 per block today, and that rate halves on a fixed schedule until it reaches zero around the year 2140.
Can the 21 million limit be raised?
There is nobody who could raise it. Every computer on the network checks the limit on its own and rejects a block that breaks it. Changing it would mean convincing everyone to run different software, and the ones who did would no longer be on the same chain.
Who decided the 21 million limit?
Satoshi Nakamoto, in the software released in 2009. The number is not written as a target: it is what you get when you add up 50 coins a block, halved every 210,000 blocks, all the way down.
Are lost bitcoin counted in the supply?
Yes, and there is no way to take them out. Nothing tells a key thrown away apart from a key nobody has touched in ten years, so lost coins stay in the total. Nobody knows how many there are.
What happens after the last bitcoin is mined?
Nothing breaks. The pay for building a block becomes fees alone, and every other rule carries on unchanged.
SEE IT RUNNING
Supply is one of the nine parts of the machine on this site: a tank that fills a little with every block and can never be topped up.
THE PARTS NEXT TO IT
SMALL PRINT
This page describes a public network and the rule written into it. It is not financial advice and quotes no price. Figures come from public Bitcoin APIs and may be a few minutes old.