How Many Bitcoins Are There Total

Many people trying to learn more nigh cryptocurrencies are interested in finding out the amount of Bitcoin in circulation. However, the question “how many Bitcoins are there?” is more complicated than information technology might seem at first glance. In this article, we’ll answer this and a few other related questions in detail. Then, without further ado, let’s get started.

Economists and journalists frequently get caught up in this question: Why does Bitcoin have value? And the answer is very easy. Because it is useful and scarce. – Erik Voorhees, CEO and founder of ShapeShift

How many Bitcoins are there?

At the time of writing, there are 18,483,118 Bitcoins, although this number is constantly increasing. New Bitcoins are created through a procedure named mining, which verifies Bitcoin transactions and adds them to the blocks of the Bitcoin blockchain. As a advantage for doing this work, the miner who managed to add a cake first receives a certain amount of Bitcoins. Currently, the block reward is 6.25 Bitcoins. Given that a new cake is added to the Bitcoin blockchain approximately every 10 minutes, it turns out that the total number of Bitcoins in circulation increases past six.25 every x minutes.

What are the limits?

The maximum amount of Bitcoins that can always be mined is 21 million. It’southward unknown why Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, chose this exact number, but nosotros exercise understand why the limitation was introduced: to prevent inflation. Dissimilar central banks, which tin issue their currencies in any volume at their discretion, thus causing aggrandizement, the number of Bitcoins is increasing at a stable, predictable and periodically decreasing rate.

Limiting the maximum number of Bitcoins is possible through a procedure called halving. Information technology cuts the cake advantage in half later every 210,000 blocks generated and happens almost every 4 years. At the very beginning, the block reward was 50 Bitcoins. Since and then, there accept been 3 halvings, and, equally already mentioned, the electric current cake reward is 6.25 Bitcoins. The next (fourth) halving event will occur around May 2024.

How many Bitcoins are there left to exist mined?

Currently, there are only ii,516,882 Bitcoins left to be mined. It’due south just xi.99% of the total amount of Bitcoin. But because of halving, the mining of the remaining Bitcoin will become ii times slower every 4 years. Thanks to this slowdown, the concluding Bitcoin will be mined effectually 2140.

Information technology’s worth mentioning that fifty-fifty after the last Bitcoin is mined, mining will non necessarily terminate, since the reward for mining (and, every bit a result, for keeping the Bitcoin network operational) volition all the same be in the form of commissions for transactions included in the block.

Bitcoin in apportionment today

• A physical device containing the private primal can be lost or broken beyond repair.
• A paper wallet tin can be lost or destroyed.
• An owner can die without giving anyone the individual key.

And then, the moral of the story is “always make a backup”.

How many Bitcoins are lost? The respond is: we don’t know for certain. To an outside observer, a lost Bitcoin looks identical to 1 that isn’t lost. The only manner to make a judge is to approximate the time during which in that location were no outgoing transactions from a specific Bitcoin address. According to a written report past blockchain assay company Chainalysis, in that location are well-nigh 4 millions Bitcoins that take been irretrievably lost. Moreover, the number of lost Bitcoins will but increment over time.

In addition, many Bitcoin holders, including large ones, adopt not to use their Bitcoins as a ways of payment. Instead, they prefer to store them in crypto wallets for an indefinite menses of fourth dimension. That means that even though these Bitcoins aren’t lost, they tin’t exist considered to be in circulation.

All things considered, the bodily amount of Bitcoins in apportionment today is much less than the total amount of Bitcoin mined.