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I am not able to understand how circulating supply is calculated by websites like CoinGecko. What does circulating supply mean here - is it the number of coins already minted? If so, how is that calculated?

Aviral Srivastava
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    I am not sure how different websites calculate it but here's a way to do it considering all the exceptions since 2009: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/38998/ –  Oct 10 '21 at 03:06

1 Answers1

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  • The first blocks had a 50 BTC subsidy
  • The subsidy of block 0 is unspendable
  • This subsidy is cut in half every 210.000 blocks
  • Block height now is 704558

This script (in Ruby) calculates the total amount of Bitcoins issued.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

first 210.000 blocks get 50 BTC as subsidy.


for every 210.000 blocks, the subsidy is cut in half.


global constants


SATOSHIS_PER_COIN = 100000000
BLOCKS_PER_EPOCH = 210000


given a block height, returns the subsidy for that block


def block_subsidy(block_height)
  epoch = block_height / BLOCKS_PER_EPOCH
  subsidy = 50 * SATOSHIS_PER_COIN
  subsidy >> epoch
end


get block height from command line or use last block with subsidy


last_block = (ARGV[0] || 6929999).to_i


total supply, use 0.0 to make it a float


total_supply = 0.0


starts with 1 since subsidy of block 0 is unspendable


for height in 1..last_block
  total_supply += block_subsidy(height)
end


show total supply in bitcoins


puts total_supply / SATOSHIS_PER_COIN

Having said that, there were some issues in some blocks, so the true total supply will be slightly less than this.

bordalix
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