The schedule
Units
Why the table still matters after sixteen years
The subsidy is the only honest selling pressure in Bitcoin's monetary base, and it halves roughly every four years whether anyone likes it or not. Holders who "trade the halving" are usually price-guessers with a calendar; the schedule's real value is the arithmetic it forces: at block 1,050,000, the network's daily new supply crosses 1,562.5 BTC and stops being a meaningful share of existing supply, under 0.008% per day. By the fifth halving it was below 0.02% per day and has never risen since.
The dates after April 2024 are projections from a 10-minute average — block times wander, and every halving in history has arrived somewhat off its estimate. The heights are law; the dates are weather. The full emission terminates in 2140 at the 33rd epoch; the last sat is mined at block 6,929,999.
FAQ
Is 21 million really capped if the software can change?
The cap is a convention enforced by consensus, not physics — which is exactly why sixteen years of incentive-compatible history is the data point maximalists cite. Changing it requires re-forking every validating device on earth to dilute holders, and the people who would vote for that are the people holding the most.
What happens to miners when the subsidy goes to zero?
Fees. The question is whether fee demand arrives — which is an adoption bet, not an arithmetic one, and the honest answer is that nobody has a time series long enough to know. The subsidy was 80%+ of miner revenue for most of history.
Why do the "issued" figures lag the explorer's?
Excludeds genesis-era quirks and assumes exactly 210,000-block eras — which the heights guarantee. Divergence is days of blocks at most.
Sats per cent?
At the Nov 2026 close, one cent bought ~14.6 sats. That number is the entire reason this page exists in satoshi terms: price talk is cents-per-coin; ownership talk is sats.