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Reading the original Nakamoto paper, I cannot see any discussion or reference to the upper bound on the number of bitcoins.

Where is it specified that at most 21 million bitcoins will be minted?

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Randomblue
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Every 210000 blocks, the reward for mining that block halves. It started out at 50BTC and now it's at 25BTC. Eventually it'll get to zero and no more bitcoins will be made.

lurf jurv
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  • Do you have a reference? – Randomblue Apr 03 '13 at 21:44
  • Bitcoin source code: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L1053 – lurf jurv Apr 03 '13 at 21:45
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    Question: if the miners decide together that they will ignore this and just add more bitcoins and accept those blocks, will they go away with that? – Karel Bílek Apr 04 '13 at 05:43
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    @KarelBílek No, the miners wouldn't get away with that, because the rest of the nodes would reject such blocks as invalid. For the miners to succeed at this they would have to convince everyone else in the network to accept their blocks. See this: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8776/could-there-be-hyperinflation-in-bitcoin – Manish Apr 04 '13 at 14:16