Bitcoin Forum

I read wikipedia and on there it seemed to imply that mining was a constant but obviously you have ramped up a bit. So how many have been mined? Are there any left? When i open my bitcoin thing, it says 129,491 blocks times 50 coins for 6,474,550 in bitcoins mined. Is that right? And difficulty has gone up 64 times (129,491 divided by 2016)? And by watching this I can see how many are being mined a day etc? Just looking for some simple ways to keep up.

Thanks

The number mined every day is constant, 50 per 10 minutes, 300 per hour, 7200 per day. This will drop in 2013 to 3600 a day, and continue to halve every four years.
All miners compete for this daily bounty, and the difficulty goes up as a result of more people mining. The question of whether it pays to mine is complex, there are a few calculators out there. You might break even in a week or never depending on price and quality of hardware, BTC rate, new people setting up rigs etc.

http://bitcoinwatch.com/

Your arithmetic is correct. 50 coins per block (now). Difficulty doesn't necessarily increase each time but in most cases it does due to the positive (and substantial!) rate of miner adoption. Bitcoincharts.com is a good way to keep tabs on the bitcoin economy and the network in general. The header contains the current block count, difficulty, estimated difficulty adjustment, estimated network hashrate, and a moving average of blocks per hour (the network tries to keep this at 6).

Or i could just go to that site. thanks.  :)

Also thanks for explaining the mining. I foolishly assumed it was mathematical difficulty versus time sensitive.