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If the number of Bitcoins in the UTXO is always equal to the number of mined Bitcoins

See: How is a wallet's balance computed?

then why do the number of bitcoins mined depicted here: https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins differ drastically from the UTXO set depicted here: https://blockchain.info/charts/utxo-count

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    A more interesting question might be whether the total value of all UTXOs equals the total number of coins mined (the sum of all block rewards). You might think it would, but some of the issues mentioned here would have caused coins to be "destroyed".
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Jun 26, 2018 at 23:12

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This is an apple : oranges comparison. The size "Number of Unspent Transaction Outputs" set is independent from the number of bitcoins in existence.

An unspent transaction output might be for a fraction of a bitcoin (some number of satoshis) yet it still counts as one unspent transaction output, a member of a very large set (over 55 million UTXO's according to the chart provided).

To put this in other terms, suppose every single UTXO was spent into a single bitcoin address. (It will never happen, this just a thought experiment) Then that address would hold all the bitcoins in existence, (a bit more than 17,100,000) and then there would only be one member in the "Unspent Transaction Output" set.

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  • Thank you! I had mistakenly assumed that the UTXO set size (in the link above) was measured in bitcoins...
    – Apod
    Commented Jun 27, 2018 at 10:18

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