9
votes
Who added the 21 million limit to Bitcoin?
This is the announcement of Bitcoin:
http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/014994.html
Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It'll be distributed to
network nodes ...
- 29.5k
8
votes
Accepted
Why bitcoin cash supply is currently 100k more than bitcoin on coinmarketcap (as of Oct 17)
EDA (Emergency Difficulty Adjustment):
Median Time Past of the current block and the Median Time Past of 6 blocks before has to be greater than 12 hours.
If so, it gets 20% easier to create proof ...
- 10.2k
6
votes
Accepted
Can Bitcoin nodes vote to increase the money supply beyond 21 million?
The reward schedule is a consensus rule in the Bitcoin network. Consensus rules are enforced by each full node independently. Node operators choose which consensus rules they enforce per the Bitcoin ...
- 77.8k
5
votes
Accepted
What percentage of newly created bitcoins have never been moved?
As of block 445550 (december 28, 2016, 19:14 UTC), there are 55450 blocks with unspent coinbase outputs, with a combined value of 1854952.32263065 BTC.
- 110k
5
votes
Accepted
How to calculate coin supply at each block height from all transactions?
The first transaction in every block is called the coinbase transaction, it is a special transaction that pays the miner their reward. This transaction adheres to different rules than the rest: it has ...
- 18.4k
5
votes
How to calculate coin supply at each block height from all transactions?
If you want the total amount of BTC created, you simply need to iterate through the coinbase transactions (first tx in every block) and add up the output. You will then need to subtract the ...
- 17.3k
5
votes
Accepted
Does Bitcoin mining reward halving have documentation? Or is it just in the code?
This is not addressed in Bitcoin's Whitepaper, although Satoshi
Nakamoto briefly mentions the decrease of the reward, but never
explicitly talks about the amount of the reward.
Satoshi speak about ...
- 892
4
votes
Accepted
What prevents miners from mining more bitcoin after 21million btc?
The Bitcoin protocol allows block authors to create a limited amount of new bitcoins in the outputs of the coinbase-transaction (which also collects the transactions fees) in each block. The amount of ...
- 77.8k
4
votes
How can I verify the BTC supply with my own node?
To verify the supply, you have to compute the theoretical maximum issuance based on the block subsidy schedule. Then you can use the gettxoutsetinfo RPC which will output the total amount of Bitcoin ...
- 72.2k
3
votes
Accepted
Number of bitcoins mined algorithm
There is a fixed rate for how many bitcoins are mined each block. The block reward halves every 210,000 blocks, see Controlled Supply.
Here is a short term bitcoin distribution projection from the ...
- 7,428
3
votes
Supply Restriction on Bitcoin & Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin Cash is a seperate fork, a seperate entity.
There will be (a bit less than) 21 million BTC, and (a bit less than) 21 million BCH.
Price differentiation is because of supply / demand for ...
- 1,081
3
votes
Accepted
How can a X-coin market cap go down while its value goes up?
As Nate Eldredge pointed out, the chart you're looking at is denominated in BTC, while the market cap is denominated in USD.
If you look at the chart below, you'll see that the price in USD (green) ...
- 77.8k
3
votes
Accepted
Digital hard cap boundaries
There is absolutely no ability in Bitcoin for higher resolution than 1 Satoshi, as all values are internally represented in this unit. You can do this on second layer systems like Lightning which can ...
- 15.5k
2
votes
What is MaxBTC and what it represents?
"We can represent any bitcoin account with MaxBTC 251."
It appears that MaxBTC is used here as a strict upper bound to refer to maximum number of bitcoins that will ever exist.
There will always be ...
- 77.8k
2
votes
Why is Bitcoin defined as having 8 decimal places?
The world GDP is $74 trillion footnote: a according to the World Bank in 2017. The max supply of Bitcoin with 108 base units is 2,100 trillion Satoshis.
If Bitcoin is to back the world's money, ...
- 21
2
votes
Accepted
Why bitcoin is not inflationary?
If one could simply "print more" Bitcoins, then it would quickly lose its value (this is the definition of inflation btw) because of increased supply. This is the main reason why, for instance, the ...
- 218
2
votes
Accepted
Is there really a limited supply of bitcoin?
You can't go into an "infinite" amount of decimal places. The smallest unit of Bitcoin is the satoshi, which is 0.00000001 bitcoin.
There will be a total of 2100000000000000 satoshi.
- 3,431
2
votes
Mining = Printing money
Is mining gold creating money? It's called mining because work goes into it. The money that comes out of it is remuneration. When the FED increases (er, eases) money into our system it's done by ...
- 189
2
votes
Does the fact that bitcoins are limited prove that the system is a scam?
There are some good answers here. I'd just like to point out that the thing with scams is that there's a lie or deception involved in it. With bitcoin there is no such thing. Everyone knows about the ...
- 2,719
2
votes
Does the fact that bitcoins are limited prove that the system is a scam?
Nobody who has even the smallest understanding of economy would spend bitcoin to buy things with because it is guaranteed that it will be, sooner or later more valuable over time.
If you assume this ...
- 143
2
votes
Bitcoin Controlled Supply
The formula above shows the total supply to be created. The block rewards will halve 32 times before 2140. While the reward halves, Bitcoin has 8 digits (in the mantissa) after the decimal point, so ...
- 10.2k
2
votes
Bitcoin Controlled Supply
It is still unclear how Satoshi chose all the constants present in the Bitcoin protocol (10 mins blocks, 21 million coins, 2016 blocks intervals, etc...).
While we'll never know for sure the full ...
- 1,274
2
votes
Where exactly is the scarcity?
Units are arbitrary, as your illustrated with the gold example. Scarcity is not about how much there is of something. It's about how much there won't be of something.
Let me paint another example. ...
- 301
2
votes
Accepted
Understanding "Bitcoin Inflation vs. Time" chart
The blue line on the graph represents the total supply of BTC in existence at that point in time (right axis).
The red line represents the instantaneous annualized inflation of the BTC supply (left ...
- 18.4k
2
votes
Accepted
How will Bitcoin be inflation free?
Inflation is newly mined coins added to circulating supply. When block rewards become zero and transaction fees are the only incentives for miners, there won't be any new coins added to circulating ...
- 36
2
votes
Could bitcoin's limited supply prevent it from becoming a worldwide currency
To answer your second question:
What purpose would extending the amount of Bitcoin by a fixed yearly supply serve? A Bitcoin consists of 100.000.000 Satoshis - even if large amounts of Bitcoin were ...
- 172
2
votes
Accepted
How do we know that Bitcoin supply is actually capped at 21 million?
The whitepaper doesn't mention any specific supply cap, and actually the distribution parameters it suggests are very different from the actual parameters implemented in Bitcoin:
6. Incentive
By ...
- 10.4k
2
votes
Why did Satoshi choose to start the block subsidy at 50 bitcoin per block?
While I don't have a definite answer to this question, having not seen anything written by Satoshi justifying this choice, an interesting property of starting the block reward at 50 is that, at the ...
- 335
1
vote
How is the monetary part of bitcoin stored?
Within the Bitcoin protocol, each Bitcoin is represented as 100000000 satoshis. Therefore, you can divide bitcoin up with a precision of 0.00000001.
In a transaction, the number of satoshis being ...
- 17.3k
1
vote
Accepted
What is the total supply and mining rewards of the BEAM mimblewimble cyptocurrency?
From the website:
Beam has a capped total supply, standing at 262,800,000 total coins. Our emission schedule is as follows:
First year’s block reward is 80 coins per block
Years 2,3,4 and 5 - 40 ...
- 26
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