Bitcoin total supply is not 21M

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

I knew it from forum discussion and today I read the article of Jameson Lopp.

It is inaccurate information about total supply of Bitcoin at exactly 21M as we see on media. Jameson explained it very detailed and technically in his article.

Some other resources to read about the same topic on Bitcoin total supply
How is the 21 Million Bitcoin Cap Defined and Enforced?
Controlled supply
Equivalent network time

This Bitcoin Inflation vs Time chart should be known by any Bitcoin investor.

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[BlackHatCoiner]

They will neither be 20,999,999.9769. That's just the total bitcoins that will ever be mined. The spendable BTC will be far less. Some are provably lost, such as genesis block's reward and the OP_RETURN transactions. Some miners have also failed to earn the entire reward which results to even less coins in circulation.

It's just easier to say that there won't be more than 21 million, which is true.

[mk4]

We can say that it's technically not, but really it's just easier to round it up and say 21 million than mentioning scary decimals. It's not like bitcoin is suddenly a bad investment or something just because of the total supply being short by .02 BTC or something. And people frequently round up finance numbers as well. It's really no biggie.

[franky1]

if you want to get technical about the technical. its not actually 50 btc (unit of 50) its not 50*coin. where coin =1btc
its actually where coin=100,000,000

coin is measured in sats. not in whole bitcoin.
if you took the 'values' from block data and transaction data in raw form and convert them from byte to decimal. the numbers are in sat units. not whole bitcoin numbers.

so technically there is no btc anywhere in block or transaction data. only sats..
yep no btc is found on the blockchain. just sat units

where by math then bunches them up into 'coin' of 100,000,000 units to be called a btc at GUI level (software user interface). not at raw data level of the blockchain

so there is infact going to be UNDER
2,099,999,997,690,000 sats

..
but if you want to talk about the GUI representation. btc in whole units would display as
20,999,999.97 which rounds to 21mill

[Mauser]

While you are right that it won't be exactly 21m bitcoins that are going to be mined, this is a number that is very far an in the future. Unfortunately we all here won't be around anymore when we are getting close to the 21m barrier. What I find more interesting is to know how many bitcoins are already lost today that can't be recovered anymore because no access to the wallets. Then we could extrapolate that number to the future at find an estimate of how many bitcoins actually will be in circulation. Who knows, this number might be closer to 19 than to 21m. Nonetheless the bitcoin price has to rise in the future, the hard cap on the bitcoin supply means that the miners require higher prices to keep mining in the future. If energy costs keep rising, so must bitcoins to keep profitable for the miners.  

[dataispower]

No body can conclude I don't trust neither believe on article writing, the point made can be of truth but to this regards the information you have to bring another form that can supersede the information of the alleged source provided, because this forum always like prove of source and evidence to guarantee the truth, you may be right from your judgement but another person will not it in that form you understand it

[cr1776]

Did anyone who has been paying attention ever think it was exactly 21 million bitcoins?   People just use that as an approximation.

[nullama]

It's not exactly 21M, but any analysis you do assuming it's exactly 21M is going to be valid anyway.

The real key element is that it's a finite number.

[sunsilk]

It's an estimation and that's not an issue that's too broad to discuss. Needless to say, it's easier for everybody to understand that bitcoin has 21M of supply.

Whether it will be reaching someday, the reality of it is that no one of us are going to see it fulfilled in the future that all of the bitcoins are mined. I wish I do and for sure that the others would love to see that happen.

But that's one fact whether it's exact 21M or not in supply.

[Darker45]

I guess there's really no big deal about this. We've been used to rounding off numbers and giving estimates to avoid inconvenience and whatnot. But if we're really interested in making a mountain out of a molehill then we could always say 2,099,999,997,690,000 Satoshis is the total supply of Bitcoin.

We might as well stop saying that the last Satoshi will be mined in 2140, that block reward halving happens every four years, that Bitcoin's block time is 10 minutes, and so on. Or perhaps that the sun is actually not 93 millions miles away, that the speed of light is actually not 186,000 miles per second, that the value of pi is actually not 3.14, and so on.

We're simply trying to make life a little easier.

[pooya87]

If you want technical details then you are right (of course it is not "total" supply but "max" supply or the cap). But on the internet and informal speech it is so much easier to just refer to the cap as 21 million without confusing the audience with technical details of how things actually work. Besides the point is almost always to tell people that unlike other currencies that have no cap and will be printed until eternity, bitcoin has a cap and there can never be more than that limit printed.

[worle1bm]

It's not exactly 21M, but any analysis you do assuming it's exactly 21M is going to be valid anyway.

The real key element is that it's a finite number.

Its fixed supply made it different from other coins which have infinite supply and later on come up with things like burning the coins.

The supply was initially set up to 21 million but there are so many coins lost that can never be returned like the OP_RETURN command or say some who have lost access to the keys and still out of circulation which can be returned or not and if the pace continue we would be having much lower number of bitcoins in circulation than 21million as we know it.

[remotemass]

Yep, there will be about 2 cents of a BTC missing to reach the 21 Million limit.
21,000,000 - 20,999,999.9769 = 0.0231 

[TheNineClub]

Regarding the 'total suplly of BTC will be mined by so and so year', I doubt it will ever come to that. BTC is just a stepping stone to other crypto developements, and it will lose it's significance to the point where it will remain a store of value, but the mining aspect will be reduced. Nothing wrong with that, that's just evolution.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

They will neither be 20,999,999.9769. That's just the total bitcoins that will ever be mined. The spendable BTC will be far less. Some are provably lost, such as genesis block's reward and the OP_RETURN transactions. Some miners have also failed to earn the entire reward which results to even less coins in circulation.

It's just easier to say that there won't be more than 21 million, which is true.

I see. The total supply is given in the last row of table in Controlled Supply on Bitcoin Wiki. I know it is not a big difference in value between 21M and 20,999,999.9769 Bitcoin. I want to help people who don't know the fact that what they read is just a rough number of Bitcoin total supply.

I was taught about it in this forum so I appreciated that. There are many explanations about how it comes to that figure for total supply on this forum. Jameson Lopp's article is a latest resource I read about i.

I shared Lopp's article because I believe many newbies don't know about it as same as me months ago.

[jamkesmas]

No one knows for sure if bitcoin is 21M, but most people believe that the total bitcoin is 21M. And I think this is the reason that makes bitcoin price soar apart from the first bitcoin. because the limited Bitcoin makes it special.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

No one knows for sure if bitcoin is 21M, but most people believe that the total bitcoin is 21M. And I think this is the reason that makes bitcoin price soar apart from the first bitcoin. because the limited Bitcoin makes it special.

People do know about it if they read Bitcoin Wiki (Controlled supply). They don't know about it because they don't mind to read Bitcoin Wiki or any important resource for their investment.

They only make investment after they got invitation from someone and just hop on with their money. They don't do their research so they are lazy enough to skip any resource which is given by others.

If you read my share, you can see it is not hard to get the information that total supply of Bitcoin is less than 21M.

[darkv0rt3x]

I would just make it simple. Supply is ~21million coins. Circulating is way less. Lost coins, stolen, marked coins, etc. But this is not bad, in some sense. The less the circulating supply, which is in the end, a new supply lower than the original one, more chances its value raises over time, because the "new supply" is smaller! The scarcer, the better.

[OgNasty]

It's not exactly 21M, but any analysis you do assuming it's exactly 21M is going to be valid anyway.

The real key element is that it's a finite number.

Agreed.  I do like how people's minds get blown by the idea that if you only keep going 1/2 the distance to your target, you will never arrive. 

Sort of how I think of Bitcoin's supply.  Certainly applies over the course of what will be my lifetime.

[sirminesalot]

Did anyone who has been paying attention ever think it was exactly 21 million bitcoins?   People just use that as an approximation.

Yeah i agree, it will be hard if we explained to someone who don't know it yet to say with the decimals, the answer will be followed by another question like "why those numbers with decimals" and we will have a long story to tell.
So i think it's okay we don't have the exact 21 mils but it's also good to know if the fact behind it is like that, maybe we need this information for future research or something useful.