384 sats \ 5 replies \ @nullama 13 Mar \ on: What is the most interesting thing about bitcoin on a technical level to you? bitcoin
It's a bit of a miracle that all the numbers used in the system work in such a perfect way.
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10: The Bitcoin system is designed so that, on average, a new block is mined every 10 minutes.
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50: The initial block reward at genesis(2009) was set to 50 bitcoins. This is the reward a miner gets for solving a new block. Every roughly 4 years this number is halved.
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2016: The mining difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks to keep blocks 10 minutes apart on average. If the miners are too fast, the difficulty increases, and if they're too slow, it becomes lower. This number comes from choosing roughly 2 weeks as the amount of time between difficulty adjustments. 2016 = (60 * 24 * 7 * 2 / 10).
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210,000: The mining reward is halved after this many blocks have been mined. It's roughly 4 years assuming constant 10 minutes blocks (60 * 24 * 365 * 4 / 10 = 210,240)
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21,000,000: This is the maximum amount of bitcoins ever to exist(Note that for some technical reasons there will be a few less sats than that though).
It was an educated guess by Satoshi Nakamoto
You can read a bit more about this here
What really blew my mind was that picking 50 for the original block subsidy causes the subsidy amount to correspond to the proportion of bitcoins created in that epoch and also to the proportion of bitcoins left to be created:
First epoch: 50 BTC -> 50% created in epoch, 50% left after
Second epoch: 25 BTC -> 25% created in epoch, 25% left after
Third epoch: 12.5 BTC -> 12.5% created in epoch, 12.5% left after
Current epoch: 6.25 BTC -> 6.25% created in epoch, 6.25% left after
Next epoch: ...
10 min Block reward nr is the % of number of Bitcoins still to be mined from total.
In around April 20, 2024, with 840k blocks mined, 96.875% BTC will be mined as block reward goes from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC per block and so on.
It means around 2028, less than 2% of BTC is left to be mined and 2032 less than 1%.
And daily new BTC issuance goes from 900 a day now, 450 in April, 225 in 2028, and about 112.5 in 2032 thar means less than 3500 BTC per month!!!
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