How many bitcoins are there? Supply, mined and lost coins

How many bitcoins are there? The hard cap is just under 21 million — exactly 20,999,999.9769 BTC. As of November 6, 2026, at block 974,833, about 20.11 million BTC had been issued under the supply schedule, or 95.8% of the cap. Roughly 891,000 coins are left to mine, and the last fractions of a bitcoin will be created around 2140. The number you can actually spend is lower still: estimates put permanently lost coins at 2.6 to 3.8 million BTC.

Below: where the 21 million figure comes from, how to calculate the mined supply yourself, how many new coins appear each day, and why "in existence" and "in circulation" are not the same number.

Where the 21 million cap comes from

There's no line in Bitcoin's code that says "stop at 21 million." The cap falls out of two rules that every node enforces:

1. The miner who finds a block earns a fixed reward, the block subsidy. In 2009 it was 50 BTC.
2. Every 210,000 blocks — roughly every four years — the subsidy is cut in half. That's the halving.

Add up the series and you get 210,000 × (50 + 25 + 12.5 + …) ≈ 210,000 × 100 = 21 million. Bitcoin Core does define MAX_MONEY = 21,000,000 × COIN in amount.h, but that's a sanity check on transaction amounts, not the issuance mechanism. Issuance lives in GetBlockSubsidy in validation.cpp, which bit-shifts the reward right once per halving.

In the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto describes new coins as an incentive for nodes and says that once a predetermined number of coins has entered circulation, the incentive can move entirely to transaction fees. The paper never explains why that number is 21 million.

Why it's 20,999,999.9769, not exactly 21 million

One bitcoin is 100 million satoshis — that's the COIN = 100,000,000 constant in amount.h. Nothing smaller than a satoshi exists, so each halving rounds the reward down. After the 33rd halving, at block 6,930,000, the subsidy hits zero. The result, as the Bitcoin Wiki calculates it, is 20,999,999.9769 BTC.

Some coins were also created but can never be spent, or never came into being at all. The Bitcoin Wiki lists:

• the 50 BTC genesis block reward, which was never added to the database of spendable outputs;
• two 50 BTC rewards lost to duplicate coinbase transactions in early blocks (fixed by BIP 30);
• block 501,726, whose miner didn't claim the 12.5 BTC subsidy, so those coins were never created.

That's why the real ceiling sits slightly below 20,999,999.9769 and why different data sites show slightly different "mined" totals.

How many bitcoins have been mined as of November 6, 2026

You can work it out from the block height. On Friday, November 6, 2026, mempool.space showed block 974,833.

The math for November 6: 19,687,500 + (974,833 − 840,000 + 1) × 3.125 = 20,108,856 BTC by schedule, or 95.8% of 20,999,999.9769. About 891,000 BTC remain.

Data trackers show slightly lower figures: Blockchain.com reported 20,106,637 BTC, and CoinGecko, in our data as of 1:00 PM ET on November 6, showed 20,106,331 BTC. The ~2,000 BTC gap comes down to counting methodology (unclaimed and unspendable rewards and the like), not coins going missing. For live numbers, see the Bitcoin page and the Numbers block of our dashboard.

The network crossed 20 million BTC in early March 2026. CoinMarketCap points to block 939,999, mined by the Foundry USA pool; River, in a March 9 note, said the 20 millionth bitcoin had been mined the day before.

How many new bitcoins are created per day

Blocks arrive about every 10 minutes on average, or roughly 144 a day. At 3.125 BTC each, that's about 450 new BTC per day and around 164,000 per year — under 0.82% annual inflation relative to the existing supply. Mining difficulty resets every 2,016 blocks to keep the pace near 10 minutes (more in How bitcoin mining works).

With BTC near $75,776 as of 1:00 PM ET on November 6, 2026 (our dashboard, Binance), a day's new issuance is worth about $34 million.

The next halving is at block 1,050,000. As of November 6 it was 75,167 blocks away, which our data puts at around April 11, 2028. Daily issuance will then drop to about 225 BTC. River expects supply to pass 20.9 million around 2039, with the final ~100,000 BTC trickling out over roughly another century.

How many bitcoins are lost forever

Mined doesn't mean spendable. If an owner loses the private key or the seed phrase, the coins stay on the blockchain but nobody can move them. There's no way to tell a lost wallet from a patient holder, so every figure here is an estimate.

Satoshi's stash is its own question. In 2013, researcher Sergio Demián Lerner spotted a distinctive fingerprint of a single early miner, now called the "Patoshi pattern." According to a Bitquery review, estimates of that miner's haul range from 0.6⁠–⁠0.7M BTC (BitMEX Research, 2018) to about 1.1M (Lerner, 2019); Bitquery's own range is 0.89⁠–⁠1.17M. It dates the last movement from the public list of those addresses to December 2017.

Subtract even the low-end loss estimate and the accessible supply is closer to 17.5 million BTC than 20.1 million. A big share of the rest sits with exchanges, ETFs and public companies, so the free-floating supply is smaller again.

Common mistakes

• "There are 21 million bitcoins today." No — 21 million is the cap reached around 2140. About 20.11 million had been issued as of November 6, 2026.
• "You have to buy a whole bitcoin." You don't. The smallest unit is 1 satoshi, or 0.00000001 BTC. Exchanges set their own minimum order sizes, but they're fractions of a coin.
• "The cap can just be raised." Changing it would take a fork that the network's nodes choose to run. Nodes on the existing rules would reject blocks paying out extra coins, so any such change would need most of the network to agree.
• "Lost coins come back." Not without the key. Old coins that suddenly move were never lost — they were just dormant.
• "Mining ends in 2140." The subsidy ends; mining doesn't. Miners will be paid from transaction fees.

FAQ

How many bitcoins are left to mine? About 891,000 BTC as of November 6, 2026 (block 974,833). Most will be issued before 2040; the remainder trickles out until around 2140.

When will the last bitcoin be mined? Around 2140, after the 33rd halving, per the Bitcoin Wiki. The exact date depends on how fast blocks are found.

How many bitcoins does Satoshi Nakamoto own? Nobody knows for sure. Patoshi-pattern estimates range from 0.6 to 1.17 million BTC; the most-cited figure is about 1.1 million.

How many satoshis are in one bitcoin? 100 million. The network will hold about 2.1 quadrillion satoshis in total.

This is not investment advice.