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What's the M0/MB inflation rate of Bitcoin?

Note: I'm asking about multiple years in order to make this question less likely to go out of date.

Murch
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Nick ODell
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  • I am not sure exactly how you want to define the money supply. The definitions of M0 and MB given here differ in whether you count physical currency held by banks and Federal Reserve account balances. I don't know what the correct analogy of those quantities is for Bitcoin, which doesn't have a Federal Reserve, and I don't know how you would define what is a bank, nor how you would find out their currency holdings (since there are no regulations forcing them to report this). Can you be more precise in your question? – Nate Eldredge Apr 25 '15 at 20:07
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    The obvious way to measure the "money supply" at any given time would simply be to determine the total number of bitcoins generated up to that time, and assume all of them are "in circulation". In that case your question should reduce to looking up some numbers and a simple computation. But it seems like maybe you are looking for something more elaborate than that. – Nate Eldredge Apr 25 '15 at 20:08
  • @NateEldredge Can you be more precise in your question? So, for example, when the genesis block was issued, the inflation rate was infinite, because it went from 0 to 50 Bitcoins. The obvious way to measure the That's exactly what I'm looking for. – Nick ODell Apr 25 '15 at 20:31
  • So, for example, let's compute the inflation rate for the year 2010. A quick binary search shows the last block generated in 2009 was 32489. Since the reward was BTC 50 per block up to that time, after block 32489 there were 32490*50=1624500 BTC in circulation.... – Nate Eldredge Apr 25 '15 at 20:44
  • The last block of 2010 was 1004090 so there were 50*(100490-32489)=3400050 BTC generated during 2010. Now 3400050/1624500 = 2.09 so Bitcoin experienced a 209% increase in the money supply during the year 2010. Is that what you are looking for? – Nate Eldredge Apr 25 '15 at 20:47
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    Bitcoin is deflationary. – Geremia Dec 22 '16 at 13:38
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    @Geremia It may be price-deflationary (as the value of coins may go up), but it is certainly supply-inflationary (as the amount of coins in circulation goes up). – Pieter Wuille Dec 22 '16 at 16:18
  • @PieterWuille, 1BTC = 1BTC – qpaycm Dec 12 '19 at 13:39

1 Answers1

18
Year   #blocks    #bitcoins       Supply inflation per annum
2009    32,489    1,624,450          -
-----------------------------------------------------------------
2010    67,920    5,020,450        209.1%
2011    59,627    8,001,800         59.4%
2012    54,526   10,614,025         32.7%  (halvening Nov 28)
2013    63,433   12,199,850         14.9%
2014    58,865   13,671,475         12.1%
-----------------------------------------------------------------
2015    54,321   15,029,500          9.9%
2016    54,851   16,075,362.5        7.0%  (halvening Jul 9th)
2017    55,928   16,774,462.5        4.4%
2018    54,498   17,455,687.5        4.1%
2019    54,232   18,133,587.5        3.9%
-----------------------------------------------------------------
2020    53,222   18,586,906          2.5%  (halvening May 11th)
2021    52,686   18,916,194          1.8%
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
2022             19,244,944          1.7%  (estimate)
2023             19,573,694          1.7%  (estimate)
2024             19,794,947          1.1%  (estimate, halvening)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
2025             19,959,322          0.8%  (estimate)
2026             20,123,697          0.8%  (estimate)
2027             20,288,072          0.8%  (estimate)
2028             20,398,073          0.5%  (estimate, halvening)
2029             20,480,261          0.4%  (estimate)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
2030             20,562,448          0.4%  (estimate)

For the past years, I have calculated the amount of bitcoins created from first block to last block per year. The numbers starting from 2022 are estimates based on the assumption that we will add 52,600 blocks per year.

Update 2017:
It turns out that 2016 had 55,184 blocks (or an average block interval of 9.51 minutes), so with 54,000 blocks I had underestimated by 1,184 blocks. Thus, inflation rates might be slightly bigger than the estimate provided here, if that interval remains accurate. New estimates were still calculated with 54,000 blocks per year.

Update 2020:
2017 had 55,928 blocks, 2018 had 54,498 blocks, and 2019 had 54,232 blocks. Seems like we're actually finally getting closer to the 54,000 estimate, so I continue to use that for the estimate of the future years.

Update 2021:
2020 had 53,222 blocks. So, I've updated future estimates assuming 53,200 blocks per year.

Update 2022:
Added 2021 and blocks column. Realized that 2015-Murch had wrong numbers for 2012/2013 and corrected the whole table. Future estimates assume 52,600 blocks per year (we were very close to 10 minute blocks in 2021).

Murch
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