How much Bitcoin is left to mine?
Bitcoin’s total supply is hardcoded at 21 million BTC, a fixed upper limit that cannot be altered without a consensus-breaking change to the protocol. This finite cap is enforced at the protocol level and is central to Bitcoin’s value proposition as a deflationary asset.
As of May 2025, approximately 19.6 million Bitcoin (BTC) have been mined, or about 93.3% of the total supply. That leaves roughly 1.4 million BTC yet to be created, and those remaining coins will be mined very slowly.
The reason for this uneven distribution is Bitcoin’s exponential issuance schedule, governed by an event called the halving. When Bitcoin launched in 2009, the block reward was 50 BTC. Every 210,000 blocks — or approximately every four years — that reward is cut in half.
Because the early rewards were so large, over 87% of the total supply was mined by the end of 2020. Each subsequent halving sharply reduces the rate of new issuance, meaning it will take over a century to mine the remaining 6.7%.
According to current estimates, 99% of all Bitcoin will have been mined by 2035, but the final fraction — the last satoshis — won’t be produced until around the year 2140 due to the nature of geometric reward reduction.
This engineered scarcity, combined with an immutable supply cap, is what draws comparisons between Bitcoin and physical commodities like gold. But Bitcoin is even more predictable: Gold’s supply grows at around 1.7% annually, whereas Bitcoin’s issuance rate is transparently declining.
Did you know? Bitcoin’s supply curve is not terminal in the traditional sense. It follows an asymptotic trajectory — a kind of economic Zeno’s paradox — where rewards diminish indefinitely but never truly reach zero. Mining will continue until around 2140, by which point over 99.999% of the total 21 million BTC will have been issued.
Beyond the supply cap: How lost coins make Bitcoin scarcer than you think
While over 93% of Bitcoin’s total supply has been mined, that doesn’t mean it’s all available. A significant portion is permanently out of circulation, lost due to forgotten passwords, misplaced wallets, destroyed hard drives or early adopters who never touched their coins again.
Estimates from firms like Chainalysis and Glassnode suggest that between 3.0 million and 3.8 million BTC — roughly 14%-18% of the total supply — is likely gone for good. That includes high-profile dormant addresses like the one believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, which alone holds over 1.1 million BTC.
This means Bitcoin’s true circulating supply may be closer to 16 million-17 million, not 21 million. And because Bitcoin is non-recoverable by design, any lost coins stay lost — permanently reducing supply over time.
Now compare that to gold. Around 85% of the world’s total gold supply has been mined — approximately 216,265 metric tons, according to the World Gold Council — but nearly all of it remains in circulation or held in vaults, jewelry, ETFs and central banks. Gold can be remelted and reused; Bitcoin cannot be resurrected once access is lost.
This distinction gives Bitcoin a kind of hardening scarcity, a supply that not only stops growing over time but quietly shrinks.
As Bitcoin matures, it’s entering a monetary phase similar to gold: low issuance, high holder concentration and increasing demand-side sensitivity. But Bitcoin takes it further; its supply cap is hard, its loss rate is permanent, and its distribution is publicly auditable.
This may lead to several outcomes:
- Increased price volatility as available supply becomes more limited and sensitive to market demand
- Higher long-term value concentration in the hands of those who remain active and secure in their key management
- A premium on liquidity, where actually spendable BTC trades at a higher effective value than dormant supply.
In extreme cases, this could produce a bifurcation between “circulating BTC” and “unreachable BTC,” with the former gaining greater economic significance, particularly in times of constrained exchange liquidity or macroeconomic stress.
What happens when Bitcoin is fully mined?
There’s a popular assumption that as Bitcoin’s block rewards shrink, the network’s security will eventually suffer. But in practice, the mining economy is far more adaptive — and much more resilient — than that.
Bitcoin’s mining incentives are governed by a self-correcting feedback loop: If mining becomes unprofitable, miners drop off the network, which in turn triggers a difficulty adjustment. Every 2,016 blocks (roughly every two weeks), the network recalibrates mining difficulty using a parameter known as nBits. The goal is to keep block times steady at around 10 minutes,…
cointelegraph.com