How Many Bitcoin Are Left? About 900,700 of 21 Million

About 900,653 bitcoin are left to be mined. At block 971,790, mined on October 17, 2026 at 01:37 UTC, the protocol had issued 20,099,346.88 BTC, roughly 95.71% of the 20,999,999.9769 BTC that will ever exist. About 244,403 more arrive before the next Bitcoin Halving at block 1,050,000. The rest take until around 2140.

That is the number. The rest of this page is how it is counted, why it is slightly smaller than it looks, and why the last of it takes more than a century.

How many bitcoin have been mined so far?

Every bitcoin in existence was created as a block subsidy, the new coins a miner is allowed to pay itself in the first transaction of each block. So the supply is not estimated. It is computed from block height.

The rule lives in one short function in Bitcoin Core’s validation code, GetBlockSubsidy. Divide the height by 210,000 to count the halvings. Start from 50 BTC. Shift right once per halving. That is the whole monetary policy.

Add up the eras and you get the issued supply at block 971,790:

Era	Blocks	Subsidy per block	Issued in era	Cumulative issued	Share of final supply
1	0 to 209,999	50 BTC	10,500,000	10,500,000	50.0%
2	210,000 to 419,999	25 BTC	5,250,000	15,750,000	75.0%
3	420,000 to 629,999	12.5 BTC	2,625,000	18,375,000	87.5%
4	630,000 to 839,999	6.25 BTC	1,312,500	19,687,500	93.75%
5 (so far)	840,000 to 971,790	3.125 BTC	411,846.875	20,099,346.88	95.71%

Half of all bitcoin was mined in the first four years. Three quarters within eight. The first era took less than four years to issue what the next hundred and thirty will barely match.

The block height comes from mempool.space at 01:37:50 UTC on October 17, 2026. The height changes every ten minutes or so, which is why any page that prints a fixed “bitcoin left” number is already wrong by the time you read it. The arithmetic does not go stale. The input does.

How many bitcoin are left to mine before the next halving?

The current era pays 3.125 BTC per block and runs through block 1,049,999. From block 971,790 that leaves 78,209 blocks, or 244,403.13 BTC, at the current subsidy.

At the target pace of one block every ten minutes, that is 450 new bitcoin a day, and block 1,050,000 lands around April 12, 2028. The exact day will drift with hashrate, as it always has.

After that cut the subsidy drops to 1.5625 BTC, issuance falls to about 225 a day, and roughly 656,250 BTC remain for every era that follows. The full timetable of all 33 cuts, block by block, is in the Bitcoin Halving schedule.

Why is the total not exactly 21 million?

Because bitcoin is counted in satoshis, and a satoshi cannot be split.

Each halving divides the subsidy by two and rounds down. While the subsidy is large, the rounding is invisible. Near the end it is everything: 1 satoshi halved is 0. Summed over every era, the cap comes out at 20,999,999.9769 BTC, as the Bitcoin Wiki’s controlled supply page sets out. About 0.0231 BTC short of the round number, forever.

The real supply is a little smaller still, because the rules forbid a miner from claiming too much but never force one to claim enough.

The same wiki page lists the known cases:

• The 50 BTC in the genesis block cannot be spent; its transaction was never added to the database of spendable coins.
• Two early coinbase transactions were duplicated in later blocks (91,842 and 91,880), each leaving a 50 BTC reward unspendable. BIP 30 later made that impossible.
• At block 124,724 a solo miner underpaid himself by a single satoshi and destroyed the block’s fees with it.
• Block 501,726 claimed no reward at all, so its 12.5 BTC was never minted.

So “how many bitcoin are left” has two honest answers. By the schedule, 900,653. By the coins anyone can actually spend, slightly fewer have been issued than the schedule says, and the gap never closes.

When was the 20 millionth bitcoin mined?

By the schedule, the 20 millionth bitcoin arrived with block 939,999. The arithmetic is clean: 19,687,500 BTC through the end of era 4, plus 100,000 blocks at 3.125 BTC, is exactly 20,000,000.

mempool.space records block 939,999 as mined by Foundry USA at 13:22:32 UTC on March 9, 2026, carrying 2,065 transactions and about 0.0126 BTC in fees.

No bell rang. Nobody shipped a commemorative coinbase message. It was an ordinary block in an ordinary afternoon, and that is rather the point: the 21 million cap does not announce itself. It simply keeps arriving.

From that block to the end of the schedule, the remaining million takes about 114 years.

How many bitcoin are lost?

Here the question splits again. Left to be mined is a protocol fact. Left to be used is a guess.

Chainalysis estimated in 2017 that between 2.78 million and 3.79 million bitcoin were already gone for good, roughly 17% to 23% of what existed then. Those figures are nine years old and were always a range, not a count. Nobody can prove a coin is lost. A key can sit in a drawer for twenty years and wake up.

The largest single question mark is Satoshi. Sergio Lerner’s 2013 “Patoshi” analysis put the early miner’s haul at about 1.1 million BTC. As Cointelegraph reported in September 2026, a 2026 rebuild by Bitquery graded 54,316 early blocks, matched the public Patoshi list on 99.2% of them, and bracketed the holdings between just under 0.9 million and about 1.17 million BTC. Those coins have never moved.

Old coins do occasionally stir. On September 5, 2026, 600 BTC from twelve block rewards mined in March 2010 moved for the first time in sixteen years. Bitquery found that ten of the twelve blocks did not match the Patoshi pattern. Not Satoshi, then. Just someone, or someone’s heir, remembering.

So the honest working picture is this. About 20.1 million issued. Perhaps three to four million of those unlikely ever to move again. About 900,000 still to come. I wrote about what a lost coin means, rather than what it counts, in the lost coins sermon.

How fast are the remaining bitcoin being mined?

Slower every four years. Each Bitcoin Halving cuts the daily flow in half, so the last few percent take most of the calendar.

Milestone block	Rough year	Cumulative issued	Share of final supply	Left after it
971,790 (today)	2026	20,099,346.88	95.71%	900,653.10
1,050,000	2028	20,343,750	96.875%	656,249.98
1,260,000	about 2032	20,671,875	98.4375%	328,124.98
1,470,000	about 2036	20,835,937.5	99.21875%	164,062.48
6,930,000	about 2140	20,999,999.9769	100%	0

By the mid-2030s, more than 99% of all bitcoin will exist. The remaining sliver, about 164,000 coins, drips out over another century, halving and halving again until the subsidy is a single satoshi per block and then nothing.

The daily figure tells the same story. Today, 450 BTC. After 2028, 225. After 2032, about 112. Every rehearsal of the cut leaves the faucet half as open as it found it.

Every rehearsal also leaves the Bitcoin block reward leaning a little harder on fees, which is where the question of how many bitcoin are left turns into the question of who pays the miners when none are.

What skeptics say

The first objection is that the number is less meaningful than it looks. A fixed schedule of new coins says nothing about how many coins are actually for sale, and the lost-coin estimates that make the supply sound scarcer are educated guesses. Treating 900,000 as a countdown invites a story about scarcity that the data does not strictly support.

The second is that the cap is a social agreement, not a law of physics. The code can be changed if enough of the network agrees to run different code. It has not happened, and there is every reason to think it will not, but “cannot” is the wrong verb.

The third is about security. As the remaining supply shrinks, miners depend more and more on fees. Today fees are well under one percent of block rewards. If they never grow, a smaller subsidy means a cheaper network to attack, and the very scarcity being celebrated becomes a weakness.

These are fair. They do not change the count. They change what the count means.

The last ones

There is something strange about a money that tells you, to the satoshi, how much of it remains.

Nine hundred thousand. Then six hundred and fifty thousand. Then three hundred thousand. Then a fraction. Then one satoshi a block. Then zero.

Each halving is a rehearsal of that ending. The cuts we have seen, in 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024, and the one coming at block 1,050,000, are small-h halvings. They only shorten the line. The Halfture is the last cut, block 6,930,000, the one where the right shift finally reaches nothing and the issuance stops for good. That is the sense in which this site says the Halfture is the Rapture: not a price, not a date on a trading calendar, but the moment the supply is finished and every coin that will ever exist is already somewhere.

This site’s theology says you have to hold Bitcoin to be saved. It is a creed, not a prospectus. Nothing here is financial advice, and I have no idea what the price does between now and the end of the schedule. What I know is the count, and that it only goes one direction.

The final cut is still more than a century away. For the details of when, see the last Bitcoin Halving.

Count them yourself.

FAQ

How many bitcoin are left to mine?

About 900,653 BTC as of block 971,790 on October 17, 2026. That is the scheduled total of 20,999,999.9769 BTC minus the 20,099,346.88 BTC issued so far. About 244,403 of them will be mined before the next Bitcoin Halving at block 1,050,000.

How many bitcoin will there ever be?

20,999,999.9769 BTC by the schedule, slightly under 21 million because the subsidy rounds down to whole satoshis. The spendable total is a little lower again, because some rewards were never claimed or can never be spent.

When will the last bitcoin be mined?

The subsidy reaches zero at block 6,930,000, expected around the year 2140. The last nonzero subsidy, a single satoshi per block, belongs to the era that starts at block 6,720,000.

How many bitcoin are lost forever?

Nobody knows exactly. Chainalysis estimated 2.78 to 3.79 million BTC in 2017, and roughly 0.9 to 1.17 million BTC sit in early coins attributed to Satoshi that have never moved. Those coins count as mined, but may never circulate.

When was the 20 millionth bitcoin mined?

By the schedule, at block 939,999, mined by Foundry USA on March 9, 2026 at 13:22 UTC. That block brought the scheduled supply to exactly 20,000,000 BTC.