How Many Bitcoins Are There? Australia 2026 Guide

The short answer

At block 971,478, mined on the morning of 15 October 2026 Australian time, the total amount of bitcoin issued was about 20,098,346 BTC, according to the blockchain.info total-supply query. You get almost the same figure by adding up every block reward in Bitcoin’s published issuance schedule up to that block, which is a useful cross-check: the supply is not an estimate from a company, it is arithmetic anyone can repeat.

That is roughly 95.7% of the maximum supply. Around 0.9 million bitcoin had not yet been issued.

The number goes up every time a new block is added, about every ten minutes on average, by the current block reward of 3.125 BTC. So any supply figure you read is a snapshot. This page dates its numbers and shows you how to check the current figure yourself.

If you are new to Bitcoin itself, our what is Bitcoin guide covers how the network works, and the Bitcoin price page shows live market data in AUD.

Where the 21 million cap comes from

The 21 million figure is not written as a single number anywhere you can point to. It is the result of two rules in Bitcoin’s software:

• Each new block may create a fixed reward, which started at 50 BTC in January 2009.
• That reward is cut in half every 210,000 blocks.

Add up every reward that schedule can ever produce: 210,000 blocks at 50 BTC, then 210,000 at 25, then 12.5, and so on. The total approaches 21 million but never quite reaches it. Because Bitcoin’s software counts in whole satoshis and rounds the reward down each time it halves, the true ceiling is about 20,999,999.98 BTC.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper describes the idea in its section on incentives: new coins are added at a steady rate as a reward for the work of creating blocks, and once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees. The specific numbers live in the code that every Bitcoin node runs.

This is what people mean when they call Bitcoin scarce. The cap is fixed in advance and public. That is different from a national currency such as the Australian dollar, where the supply of money is managed by the central bank and the banking system. Whether a fixed supply is good or bad is a long-running economic debate; this page sticks to how it works.

How new bitcoin is issued

There is exactly one way new bitcoin comes into existence: the block reward, also called the block subsidy.

Miners compete to add the next block of transactions to the blockchain. The winner includes a special first transaction in its block, called the coinbase transaction, that pays itself the current reward plus the fees from the transactions in the block. Every Bitcoin node checks that this payment is no larger than the rules allow. A block that pays too much is rejected by the network.

Bitcoin aims for one block about every ten minutes. Every 2,016 blocks, roughly two weeks, the network automatically adjusts the mining difficulty so that blocks keep arriving at about that pace even as more or less computing power joins. That adjustment is why the issuance schedule stays predictable: more miners do not mean more bitcoin.

The current reward is 3.125 BTC per block. At about 144 blocks a day, that works out to roughly 450 new bitcoin per day, or about 164,000 a year. Transaction fees are paid on top, but fees are existing bitcoin changing hands, not new supply. Our Bitcoin transaction fees guide explains how fees work.

Halvings and the issuance schedule

The halving is the moment the block reward drops by half. It happens at a block height, not a calendar date, so the date is only known approximately in advance.

The first four eras together issued 19,687,500 BTC. The current era will add 656,250 more by the time it ends at block 1,049,999, bringing the total to 20,343,750. Each later era adds half as much as the one before.

At the average block time seen recently, the next halving at block 1,050,000 is expected in the first half of 2028. Treat that as an estimate: it will shift if blocks arrive faster or slower. Our Bitcoin halving guide covers the history of each halving and what happened around them.

How many bitcoins are left to mine

Using the block 971,478 figure, about 901,654 BTC were still to be issued, around 4.3% of the cap.

You can work this out yourself with the schedule above:

• Issued through the first four eras: 19,687,500 BTC.
• Blocks mined in the current era by block 971,478: about 131,478, each paying 3.125 BTC, or about 410,869 BTC.
• Total: about 20,098,369 BTC, within a few dozen coins of the blockchain.info figure. The small gap comes from how each source counts the latest blocks and a handful of early blocks whose rewards were never fully claimed.

Because the reward keeps halving, the remainder does not run out evenly. More than 80% of it is scheduled to be issued by the mid-2030s, and the last few thousand coins will trickle out over the following century.

When the last bitcoin is mined

The block reward keeps halving until it rounds down to zero satoshis. That happens after 33 halvings, at block 6,930,000. At an average of ten minutes per block, that block is expected around the year 2140.

After that, miners will be paid only through transaction fees. Whether fees alone will be enough to keep the network secure is an open question that researchers and developers discuss; it is a long way off, and the answer depends on how Bitcoin is used by then.

It is worth knowing that the last coin is not a single dramatic event. By the 2100s the reward will already be tiny fractions of a bitcoin per block.

Lost and unspendable coins

“How many bitcoins are there?” has a second, harder answer: how many can actually be used. Some issued coins never will be.

Provably unspendable coins. The 50 BTC reward in the very first block, the genesis block, cannot be spent because of how that block was coded. Some coins have also been deliberately sent to addresses nobody can control, a practice called burning.

Unclaimed rewards. In a small number of early blocks, miners claimed less than the full reward they were allowed. The unclaimed amount was simply never created.

Lost keys. Anyone who loses the private keys to a wallet loses access to its coins permanently. Early users who mined coins on laptops when bitcoin was nearly worthless are often cited as examples. On the blockchain, lost coins look exactly like coins whose owner is simply holding for a long time, so nobody can count them precisely. Analytics firms publish estimates in the millions of bitcoin, but those rely on assumptions such as how long coins have gone without moving.

Large coin holdings from Bitcoin’s earliest months, often attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, have never moved. Estimates of their size come from blockchain analysis of early mining patterns, not from any confirmed record.

The practical lesson for individuals is about custody, not supply. If you hold bitcoin yourself, keeping your recovery phrase safe is what stops your coins joining the lost total. Our cold wallet guide explains self-custody and its responsibilities.

Satoshis: dividing a bitcoin

One bitcoin is made up of 100,000,000 satoshis, often shortened to sats. The software tracks every balance in whole satoshis, which is why the supply cap ends in a fraction rather than a round number.

The practical point is that you do not need to own a whole bitcoin. Balances and purchases can be any amount down to a single satoshi, subject to the minimums a platform sets. Seeing a coin’s total supply, or its price per whole coin, says little on its own about value; our crypto market cap guide explains why price and supply have to be read together.

How to check the supply yourself

One of Bitcoin’s distinctive features is that you do not have to take anyone’s word for the supply.

Block explorers. Public explorers such as mempool.space show the current block height, the reward in each block and the next difficulty adjustment. With the height and the halving table above, you can calculate the issued supply.

Supply queries. Some services publish a total-supply number directly. Blockchain.info’s total-supply query is the source used for the figure on this page.

Your own node. If you run Bitcoin Core, the command gettxoutsetinfo reports the total amount held in unspent transaction outputs, calculated from your own copy of the blockchain. This is the most independent check available, and it will come out slightly lower than the issued figure because some coins are provably unspendable and excluded from that set.

Price sites. Market data sites list Bitcoin’s circulating supply next to its price. Their figure should be close to the explorer figure. A large gap is a sign to check how they are counting.

Can the 21 million cap change?

In principle, any rule in software can be changed. In practice, changing Bitcoin’s cap would require the people and businesses running Bitcoin nodes around the world to choose to run software with a different rule. Nodes reject blocks that break the rules they run, so a miner or developer cannot raise the cap on their own.

The cap has never changed since 2009, and raising it is widely regarded in the Bitcoin community as very unlikely, because the fixed supply is one of the main reasons people value the network. That is a description of the incentives involved, not a guarantee about the future.

Other cryptocurrencies make different choices. Ethereum has no fixed maximum supply, Dogecoin issues a fixed number of new coins every year, Litecoin copies Bitcoin’s design with an 84 million cap, and XRP created its entire supply at launch. Bitcoin’s share of the whole crypto market is tracked by bitcoin dominance.

The Australian angle

Supply claims in scams. Fake investment schemes often lean on Bitcoin’s scarcity with lines like “only a few bitcoin left, buy before they run out”. As this page shows, issuance continues on a public schedule for more than a century. Scamwatch, run by the ACCC, reports that investment scams cause the largest losses of any scam type in Australia. Our crypto scams guide covers the common patterns.

Exchanges. Australian digital currency exchanges must register with AUSTRAC. Registration covers anti-money-laundering rules and is not an endorsement of any coin. Our crypto exchange guide explains how they work.

Tax. Bitcoin’s total supply has no effect on your tax. The ATO looks at your own transactions, such as when you sell, swap or spend crypto. Students can see our crypto tax guide for Australian students.

Where to check before you act. ASIC’s Moneysmart crypto assets page explains crypto’s risks in plain English, including that prices can fall sharply.

Sources and as-of date. Supply figures: blockchain.info total-supply and block-count queries and mempool.space block height, read at 09:00 AEST on 15 October 2026 (block 971,478). Issuance rules: the Bitcoin whitepaper (bitcoin.org) and Bitcoin Core’s consensus rules. Halving dates are the UTC dates of blocks 210,000, 420,000, 630,000 and 840,000.

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