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How can someone calculate the current/real-time value of a Bitcoin block?

What is the equation/algorithm used to determine this?

I've found a few resource online, but I'm a little confused

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  • By value, are you asking about the size of the reward, or the rules about whether it's valid? Or are you talking about the value of Bitcoin?
    – Nick ODell
    Commented Apr 9, 2015 at 18:03
  • Reward for valid block
    – Mark
    Commented Apr 9, 2015 at 18:33

2 Answers 2

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How can someone calculate the current/real-time value of a Bitcoin block?

Steps:

  1. run bitcoin-cli getblockcount to get current block_height
  2. current_block_reward = 50 / [(block_height MOD 210000) + 1]

What is the equation/algorithm used to determine this?

Value the of a Bitcoin block defined here. The default value is 50 * 100,000,000 Satoshis.

After every "SubsidyHalvingInterval" blocks, the reward of each block halved. The SubsidyHalvingInterval is defined here

CAmount GetBlockValue(int nHeight, const CAmount& nFees)
{
    CAmount nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;
    int halvings = nHeight / Params().SubsidyHalvingInterval();

    // Force block reward to zero when right shift is undefined.
    if (halvings >= 64)
        return nFees;

    // Subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks which will occur approximately every 4 years.
    nSubsidy >>= halvings;

    return nSubsidy + nFees;
}
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  • Actually the block reward is 50/(2**(630001 // 210000)) Commented Mar 18, 2023 at 9:33
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You can also use the BlockExplorer API totalbc query: http://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc/####, where #### can be a past or future block number, and the return value is the total BTC in circulation. bcperblock may also be helpful.

See BlockExplorer.com/q/ for a full list of queries.

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