Bitcoin Passes 20 Million Coins Mined, Leaving Final Million for Next 114 Years

Bitcoin crossed a milestone on Monday that its design made inevitable from the first block in 2009. With block 939,999, mined at 13:22 UTC on March 9 by the Foundry USA pool, the total number of bitcoin ever issued reached 20 million. That is more than 95% of the 21 million coins the protocol will ever create.

The remaining one million bitcoin will not arrive quickly. Because the reward paid to miners keeps shrinking, the last fractions of a coin are not expected to be issued until around the year 2140, roughly 114 years from now, according to The Block.

How the math works

Bitcoin’s supply schedule is fixed in its code. Miners who add a new block to the chain receive a set amount of newly created bitcoin, known as the block subsidy. That subsidy started at 50 BTC in 2009 and is cut in half every 210,000 blocks, an event known as the halving, which happens roughly every four years.

The arithmetic behind Monday’s milestone is straightforward. The first four reward periods, covering blocks zero through 839,999, created 19,687,500 BTC in total. Since the most recent halving in April 2024, each block has paid 3.125 BTC. After exactly 100,000 more blocks at that rate, the theoretical total reached 20 million at block 939,999, which public block data from mempool.space shows was found by Foundry USA.

The official count carries small quirks, though: The Block notes that about 230 BTC, including the subsidy from the genesis block, can never be spent.

At current rates, miners produce about 450 new bitcoin per day, down from roughly 900 before the 2024 halving. The next halving, expected around April 2028, will cut the subsidy to 1.5625 BTC per block.

Scarcity, in practice and in theory

Supporters of bitcoin often point to its fixed supply as the feature that separates it from government currencies and from most other crypto assets. Thomas Perfumo, global economist at Kraken, told The Block that bitcoin’s “programmable scarcity,” combined with predictable issuance and a decentralized design, is what sets it apart from other forms of money and asset classes.

The figure of 20 million also overstates how many coins are actually available. An unknown number have been lost to forgotten passwords, discarded hard drives and holders who have died without passing on their keys. Estimates vary widely, and some analysts place the permanently inaccessible supply in the range of two to nearly four million BTC, though no one can measure it precisely.

The milestone also carries a historical echo. In January 2009, early bitcoin contributor Hal Finney wrote on a cryptography mailing list that if bitcoin ever became a dominant payment system, 20 million coins spread across global household wealth would give each coin a value of about $10 million. He called the scenario “something to think about,” The Block recalled.

Little reaction in the market

The milestone itself did not move prices, which is consistent with the view that a fully predictable supply schedule is already reflected in the market. Bitcoin was trading near $69,350 on Monday morning in New York, according to The Block, after slipping toward the mid-$60,000 range earlier in the session. Analysts quoted in that report tied recent price swings to oil prices, a strong dollar and expectations for Federal Reserve policy, rather than anything happening on the network.

The largest corporate buyer of bitcoin marked the day in its own way. Strategy, the company led by Michael Saylor, disclosed on Monday that it had bought another 17,994 BTC for about $1.3 billion, bringing its holdings to 738,731 BTC, according to The Block. That single company now holds roughly 3.7% of all bitcoin that has been mined.

Why it matters for crypto

For most holders, the 20 million mark is symbolic. Nothing about bitcoin’s rules changed on Monday, and the issuance schedule has been public since the network launched. That predictability is the point: no company, foundation or central bank can decide to issue more coins, and any change to the cap would require broad agreement among the people who run the network’s software, something that has never come close to happening.

The longer-term significance is for miners and for the security of the network. As the subsidy keeps shrinking, miners will rely more and more on transaction fees to cover the cost of hardware and electricity. With fewer than one million coins left to issue, and with each halving cutting new supply further, the question of whether fee revenue can sustain enough mining power to keep the network secure will become harder to ignore over the coming decades.

The milestone is also a reminder of how much of bitcoin’s supply story is already written. Roughly 95% of all coins exist today. The next century will be about distributing the last few percent, and about who ends up holding the rest.