30
votes
Accepted
How does the most recently found critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) work?
If you were a miner, what are the steps you would take to create the extra (21,000,012.5th) bitcoin?
Where in the source code is this exactly (link)?
There are two components to CVE-2018-17144. There ...
- 72.2k
18
votes
When, if ever, will "peak bitcoin" occur?
According to comments by the project's founder, Bitcoin's issuance rate was indeed inspired by that of precious metals. However, it is implemented algorithmically, of course, which artificially limits ...
- 77.8k
14
votes
Accepted
Where is the bitcoin source code is the 21 million hard cap stated?
Where is the bitcoin source code is the 21 million hard cap stated?
Nowhere, because there isn't actually a 21 million cap rule.
The relevant code is this:
CAmount GetBlockSubsidy(int nHeight, const ...
- 110k
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
9
votes
Accepted
Will a post-subsidy block with no transactions include a coinbase transaction?
Every Bitcoin block is required to have a coinbase transaction, regardless of fees or subsidy.
Additionally, every transaction (including the coinbase), must have at least one output (possibly 0-...
- 110k
8
votes
Accepted
How many Bitcoin are mined per day?
Colin's calculation has a mistake in that it doesn't account for partial Bitcoins not being paid out in block rewards. It rounds down the reward per day, but should round each block reward down to the ...
- 77.8k
7
votes
Accepted
Why does Bitcoin block 526,591 have a 6.25 (instead of 12.5) block reward?
There is a maximum limit on the block reward which is 12.5 BTC but nothing prevents a miner from claiming less than 12.5 BTC. In fact, there have been times when miners forgot to claim any bitcoin at ...
- 773
7
votes
How do you calculate when 98% of Bitcoin will be mined?
I have created this Google sheet to calculate various metrics of the reward schedule. The numerical maximum of bitcoins that could be created is 20,999,949.9769 BTC.
0.98 × max = 20,579,950.977362
So,...
- 77.8k
7
votes
Accepted
How/When is mining reward given in the presence of forking / orphan chain?
You have to distinguish between nodes' local view of the chain, and your global view when discussing here.
Every chain (meaning: a block together with all its direct and indirect ancestors) is a ...
- 110k
6
votes
Accepted
What would happen if miners refused halving
What if after this phase the first miner or more than 51% of them decide to keep the current production rate ? Do their block will be refused like if they had produced a wrong block ?
Exactly. This ...
- 18.4k
6
votes
Accepted
when is the mining of the last bitcoin?
There will be 32 halvings, but the block subsidy will be reduced 33 times with the last reduction not halving it, but reducing it from 1 sat per block to 0 sats per block (see table with calculation). ...
- 77.8k
5
votes
How is the bitcoin 21 million cap implemented?
An updated answer.
First, check out the block subsidy calculation: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v23.0/src/validation.cpp#L1417
CAmount GetBlockSubsidy(int nHeight, const Consensus::Params&...
- 447
5
votes
Is it technically possible to change the total amount of Bitcoin?
Technically, yes, yes, and yes. However, I'm not sure if we'd still call it "Bitcoin" at that point.
Any of these changes would require a hard fork, which means that the underlying rules of the ...
- 8,852
5
votes
Accepted
Understanding the bitwise left shift logic on determining nSubsidy
This isn't really a Bitcoin question, just a math one, but I'll give it a shot anyways.
Let's look at the binary values for a few numbers from base 10
0 | 0
1 | 1
2 | 10
3 | 11
4 | ...
- 17.3k
5
votes
Who decides the block reward in Bitcoin?
When the creator of Bitcoin published the original Bitcoin client, it came with rules for an inflation schedule. As a means of bootstrapping the system and distributing the initial supply, miners were ...
- 77.8k
5
votes
Accepted
Does adding more miners create more bitcoin?
I was on another forum and the claim was made that the miners using new technology GPUs
GPU mining has been obsolete for Bitcoin mining since around 2014. All mining these days is done using custom ...
- 110k
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
5
votes
Spending block reward after subsidy end
Yes. We still need to allow time for small-scale block reorganisations. Miners of stale blocks should not collect and spend fees that are needed by ultimately successful miners of the same ...
- 28.5k
5
votes
Accepted
Will the majority of miners quit mining next year if the price of bitcoin remains as it is today? Can it harm the network?
An important point is that costs are not constant.
If miners leave the network as a result of block-reward halving, the network difficulty will automatically reduce and therefore mining costs will ...
- 28.5k
4
votes
Why was the upper limit of 21 million bitcoins put in place?
I find this surmise by
Cryddit on BitcoinTalk interesting:
Satoshi cared that people using Javascript (?) or other languages
which encode all numbers as 'double' (64-bit floats) would not have ...
- 77.8k
4
votes
Is there a limit to the number of Bitcoin addresses?
Is there a limit to the number of Bitcoin addresses?
If I understand it correctly, there can never be more than 1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976 of the current type of addresses. ...
- 28.5k
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
When will the last block halving happen and when will the block reward fall to 0?
I created a Google doc to calculate some metrics of the Bitcoin reward schedule including e.g. the number of halvings, their first blocks, and how much supply is left to be mined.
As you can see, ...
- 77.8k
3
votes
There's talk of increasing the blocksize - if this can be achieved - does this mean that the 21m btc limit can also be changed?
Flat-out increasing the blocksize is a hardfork. Hardforks require the overwhelming support of all parts of the Bitcoin sphere to be adopted, otherwise they will create a forkcoin. 51% would be ...
- 77.8k
3
votes
What would happen if one person mined all unmined bitcoins?
Then all those bitcoins would belong to that person. There's nothing in the current Bitcoin protocol that prevents this.
I don't know what you mean by "would 'they' confiscate it". From the point ...
- 23.1k
3
votes
Why do bitcoins have a total limit?
The number of newly-created bitcoins with every mined block gets halved every 4 years on average. (More precisely, every 210,000 blocks). When bitcoin started, this was 50 new coins per block and ...
- 31
3
votes
Accepted
Is the number of coins limited by rule or by computational infeasibility?
No it does not become computationally infeasible, 1 halving per 210.000 blocks leads to a total of 21m due to math.
Bitcoin block reward is 50 for 210.000 blocks then 25 for 210.000 blocks then 12.5 ...
- 3,589
3
votes
Accepted
Is there a way to create 9995000 spendable BTC on regtest?
This is not possible because the regtest network is limited to 15000 regtest BTC. Unlike mainnet and testnet, it's halving interval is 150 blocks which limits the number of regtest BTC on one chain to ...
- 72.2k
3
votes
Accepted
Does Halving cause inflation?
Inflation is "a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money."
One cause of inflation is printing more money.
By halving the rate of production of new money you halve its ...
- 28.5k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible