Topic: The numbers of Bitcoin (Read 135 times)

Basically yes. I said "basically" because the number might be incorrect, since I've read detailed about some 2 block rewards and some miner fees missed, which clearly don't add up to 196 BTC.
But when looking for the initial info I've read (I no longer know where) this twitter link was what I've found, showing... this difference.


Then I won't comment yet about the badly closed quotes; I know how difficult is that on smartphone.

Total number of bitcoins is 20999999.9769


* I will add the ~196 BTC lost people tend to keep forgetting about at every nice milestone
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I was trying to respond to you in a separate thread, but I found you wrote something similar here, so I think this topic is more suitable for such a discussion. Are these *mistakes* what you mean by the missing 196 BTC?
I'm using the phone now so I couldn't get more details but it's the first time I've heard of this story.

It may worth mentioning that the "technical reasons" are not errors in bitcoin code, instead:
* the sum/geometric series don't go to infinite, they do stop at a fixed iteration, hence it's a bit earlier than 21M
* some miners did mistakes (and/or intended tests) causing some amounts of bitcoin not getting mined/lost forever (and I don't talk here about wallets with lost keys, that's a completely different story).

10: The Bitcoin system is designed so that, on average, a new block is mined every 10 minutes.

50: The initial block reward at genesis(2009) was set to 50 bitcoins. This is the reward a miner gets for solving a new block. Every roughly 4 years this number is halved.

2016: The mining difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks to keep blocks 10 minutes apart on average. If the miners are too fast, the difficulty increases, and if they're too slow, it becomes lower. This number comes from choosing roughly 2 weeks as the amount of time between difficulty adjustments. 2016 = (60 * 24 * 7 * 2 / 10).

2140: The approximate year in which the last reward will be given to a miner, assuming the precision hasn't changed by that time. If the precision is increased, then mining rewards will continue as usual with their halving mechanism, always getting closer and closer to the maximum of 21 million bitcoins.

210,000: The mining reward is halved after this many blocks have been mined. It's roughly 4 years assuming constant 10 minutes blocks (60 * 24 * 365 * 4 / 10 = 210,240)

21,000,000: This is the maximum amount of bitcoins ever to exist(Note that for some technical reasons there will be a few less sats than that though). You can get to this number by doing a bit of math:

Each rewards era has half of the reward as before: 50, 25, 12.5, 6.25, 3.125, 1.5625, etc. If you sum them all up you get an infinite geometric series that can be solved and the result is 100:



Each one of the 210,000 blocks of each era receive their corresponding rewards, so you can sum them all up to get the total number of bitcoins: 210,000 * 50 + 210,000 * 25, etc, which is the same as doing 210,000 * (50 + 25 + ... ), and we already know the number in parenthesis is 100. So total rewards are 210,000 * 100 = 21,000,000.

100,000,000: The amount of satoshis in one bitcoin. Satoshis are also called sats.