Linked Questions

68 votes
7 answers
162k views

How many bitcoins will there eventually be?

Since bitcoins are being regularly rewarded to miners, will the number of bitcoins continue to grow indefinitely, or will there be a maximum total number of bitcoins in existence? And if there is ...
eMansipater's user avatar
  • 14.5k
46 votes
3 answers
21k views

Why can’t the genesis block coinbase be spent?

According to the bitcoin wiki: The first 50BTC block reward went to address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa, though this reward can't be spent due to a quirk in the way that the genesis block is ...
Nick ODell's user avatar
  • 29.5k
41 votes
5 answers
27k views

What will happen to mining after the 20 999 999th Bitcoin?

After the 21 millionth bitcoin or 20,999,999th bitcoin is mined, what will happen to bitcoin mining? - will it just stop, or will we make a further division of the satoshi thanks to Bitcoin's infinite ...
Marco Scannadinari's user avatar
28 votes
3 answers
5k views

Will all 21 million units be completely mined one day?

It is written that the supply of Bitcoin units is limited to 21 million and that this limit will approximately have been reached around the year 2030. But is there an actual "last Bitcoin" (or "last ...
herzmeister's user avatar
  • 3,507
20 votes
2 answers
2k views

What happens when a miner does not claim all fees/generated coins?

Suppose that a miner for some reason has the generation transaction of their blocks not take all the possible coins. This can happen for a variety of reasons, almost all of which are bugs: An off-by-...
Daniel H's user avatar
  • 694
14 votes
2 answers
3k views

Can someone explain this weird mining activity?

I can't figure why this block has 0 coinbase with 0 transactions... however still a valid block? Or it it empty? According to whalepanda this coinbase was sacrificed by unknown miner. See the block ...
user380208's user avatar
7 votes
1 answer
344 views

Why was BIP34 (Block v2, Height in Coinbase) not implemented via the coinbase tx's locktime or nSequence?

At some point in 2011/12 miners started using custom mining algorithms ignoring the best practise to mine to a different new public key (hash) for each subsequent block. This lead to a lack of ...
Felix Weis's user avatar
7 votes
1 answer
443 views

Why would a Bitcoin miner take less than the full reward?

In "Mastering Bitcoin", the author notes (source): The maximum number of coins mined is the upper limit of possible mining rewards for bitcoin. In practice, a miner may intentionally mine a block ...
Kostas's user avatar
  • 183
5 votes
3 answers
972 views

How to calculate coin supply at each block height from all transactions?

We are working on a small project and imported all block information to mongoDB. Right now we're aiming to calculate the coin supply regarding to the block number. My plan is to loop through all ...
pr0logas's user avatar
  • 180
5 votes
1 answer
862 views

Verifying Block 124724

Just for my own educational purposes, I'm writing something that verifies the blocks on the blockchain. I had in my code this line: assert coinbase_amount == block_reward + total_tip And it succeeded ...
bnsh's user avatar
  • 193
5 votes
1 answer
661 views

Who decides the block reward in Bitcoin?

I know that when a miner mines a block, he will be rewarded with some bitcoins. But who decides how much bitcoin he will get? If it is decided by all the miners (as they are the ones verifying ...
Shivam Goyal's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
3k views

Where is the bitcoin source code is the 21 million hard cap stated?

I'd like to be able to see the 21,000,000 number.
Eoin's user avatar
  • 359
4 votes
1 answer
1k views

How do you calculate when 98% of Bitcoin will be mined?

Trying to find a calculation to work out what year will an arbitrary percentage of bitcoin will be mined, specifically 98%. I know it takes 10 minutes to mine 1 block but unsure how to use this? Thank ...
Saihdev's user avatar
  • 41
4 votes
1 answer
555 views

Why does Bitcoin block 526,591 have a 6.25 (instead of 12.5) block reward?

https://chain.so/block/BTC/0000000000000000002ba5a1fb96f93e6c215d62db4280f1cbd30e82c7c71fba https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/526591 It's an empty block (zero transactions), but the coinbase ...
vonneumann1903's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
108 views

How do fees get processed in bitcoin? (protocol question)

If the fee isn’t written into the ledger, and it’s just the difference between the input transaction amount and the output transaction amount, how does the miner prove he has access in his wallet to ...
lollercoaster's user avatar

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