How Many Bitcoins Are There in 2026? 20.1 Million Mined, Far Fewer Available

How many bitcoins are there? On October 29, 2026, the answer was exactly 20,105,475. Few things in finance can be counted that precisely. Bitcoin’s supply is written into its code, and every coin ever created sits on a public ledger.

The harder question is how many of those coins anyone can actually use. About 1.1 million are linked to Satoshi Nakamoto and haven’t moved in more than 16 years. More than 17% of all bitcoin hasn’t moved in a decade. And the US government’s own holdings could be anywhere from about 29,000 to 328,000 coins, depending on who’s counting.

Short answer: about 20.1 million bitcoin have been mined, or 95.7% of the 21 million that can ever exist. Fewer than 900,000 are left to mine, and the last will arrive around 2140. How many are lost, and how much the largest holders really control, can only be estimated.

At a glance

• 20,105,475 bitcoin had been mined as of October 29, 2026, which works out to 95.7% of the 21 million maximum.
• About 894,500 bitcoin are left to mine. The last is expected around 2140.
• About 450 new bitcoin are created each day since the 2024 halving cut the reward to 3.125 per block.
• About 1.096 million bitcoin are linked to Satoshi Nakamoto, according to Arkham, roughly 5.5% of everything mined.
• 848,517 and 814,715: the bitcoin held by Strategy and BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, the two largest holders that report their own totals.
• Over 17% of all bitcoin hadn’t moved in 10 years or more as of June 2025, according to Fidelity Digital Assets.
• 28,988 to 328,372: the range of estimates for the US government’s bitcoin. No official total has been published.

From Certain to Unknown: The Bitcoin Ladder

Bitcoin is unusual. Part of its count can be checked by anyone, down to the last coin. Part of it rests on what companies report. And part of it is educated guesswork. The further down this ladder you go, the less certain the number becomes.

The bitcoin ladderFrom verifiable to unknown

The top rungs can be verified. Bitcoin’s rules are written into its code, and every coin ever created is recorded on a public ledger. The code starts the reward at 50 bitcoin per block and halves it every 210,000 blocks. Add up every reward and you get just under 21 million. Anyone can count how many have been mined so far. On October 29, 2026, it was 20,105,475, which works out to 95.7% of the maximum.

The middle rungs are reported. The biggest holders publish their own totals. Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, reports its bitcoin in filings with the SEC. BlackRock publishes its fund’s holdings on its website. These are the holders’ own numbers, released on their own schedule. Between them, the two hold about 1.66 million bitcoin, which works out to 8.3% of everything mined.

The lower rungs are estimates. No one has proven who owns the roughly 1.1 million bitcoin linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. Arkham attributes them based on a pattern in how early blocks were mined, known as the Patoshi Pattern. It’s a strong pattern, but still an attribution, not proof. Lost bitcoin is even harder to pin down. A coin that hasn’t moved in years might be lost, or its owner might just be holding it. The most recent Chainalysis estimate is from 2020.

The bottom rung is unknown. The US created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in March 2025, funded with bitcoin forfeited in criminal and civil cases. But the order setting it up says only that the government holds “a significant amount” of bitcoin. It gives no count.

So “how many bitcoins are there?” has a precise answer: 20,105,475 as of October 29, 2026. “How many can actually be used?” doesn’t.

How New Bitcoin Is Created, and When It Stops

No central bank issues bitcoin. New coins enter circulation only one way: as a reward to the miners who add each new block of transactions to the blockchain. The Bitcoin whitepaper describes this as the first transaction in every block, a special one that “starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block.” Miners also collect transaction fees.

The network keeps blocks coming at a steady pace. Every 2,016 blocks, it adjusts how hard they are to find, so that a new one arrives about every 10 minutes on average.

The reward started at 50 bitcoin per block in 2009. Bitcoin’s code cuts it in half every 210,000 blocks, which comes out to about every four years. Each cut is called a halving.

The block reward over time

The most recent halving came in 2024, at block 840,000. It cut the reward from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoin, and new supply fell from about 900 bitcoin a day to about 450. The next halving is expected around block 1,050,000, likely in 2028.

This is why most bitcoin already exists. The early years, when rewards were largest, created most of the supply. By October 2026, 95.7% of the maximum had been mined. The remaining 894,500 or so will trickle out over more than a century.

The halvings don’t go on forever. Bitcoin’s code allows 33 of them in total. Rewards are counted in satoshis, the smallest unit of bitcoin, worth one hundred-millionth of a coin. After enough halvings, the reward shrinks below a single satoshi and reaches zero. That’s expected to be around block 6,930,000, in about 2140.

After that, no new bitcoin will be created. Miners will be paid only through transaction fees, which the whitepaper anticipated: once a set number of coins have entered circulation, it says, the reward “can transition entirely to transaction fees.”

Lost Bitcoin: The Biggest Unknown

Bitcoin can’t be destroyed in the usual sense. Every coin stays on the blockchain forever. What gets lost is the private key, the password that lets someone move it. “Technically speaking, bitcoin can’t be lost,” Chainalysis co-founder Jonathan Levin told NPR in 2018. Without the key, though, the coins can never be spent again.

No one knows how many coins that applies to, because the blockchain can’t tell a lost coin from one that’s simply being held. Estimates come from studying how long coins have gone without moving.

Estimates of lost or untouched bitcoin

The Chainalysis estimates are still the ones most often repeated, but they’re years old. The 2017 study also assumed that the roughly 1 million bitcoin linked to Satoshi Nakamoto were gone for good. Its full method was kept confidential.

Fidelity’s figure is newer, and it measures something more concrete. More than 17% of all bitcoin issued hadn’t moved in at least 10 years as of June 2025. Nearly 3.4 million bitcoin had joined that group since the start of 2019. About 566 a day were crossing the 10-year mark, more than the 450 new bitcoin mined each day. Fidelity expects the share to reach 20% by 2028 and 25% by 2034.

But Fidelity doesn’t call those coins lost. It says only that “an unknown portion of this supply is believed to be lost or inaccessible,” and that some could return to circulation. A coin untouched for a decade might belong to someone who lost the key, someone who died without passing it on, or someone who just never sold.

So the most solid statement is this: millions of bitcoins haven’t moved in years, and some share of them will likely never move again. Exactly how many is unknown.

Who Holds the Most Bitcoin

Three holdings stand out: the coins linked to Satoshi Nakamoto, Strategy’s treasury, and BlackRock’s bitcoin fund. Together they come to about 2.76 million bitcoin, which works out to 13.7% of everything mined. But they’re known with very different levels of certainty.

The largest is also the least certain. In 2013, researcher Sergio Demian Lerner noticed a pattern in how early blocks were mined, which suggested one entity had mined a large share of them from the very first block. He estimated that entity’s coins at “around 1M Bitcoins” and wrote that he couldn’t be “100% certain” they all belonged to Satoshi. Today, blockchain analytics firm Arkham puts the total at about 1.096 million bitcoin across 22,000 addresses, all mined in 2009 and 2010. Arkham says they haven’t moved since 2010. That’s about 5.5% of all bitcoin mined.

Even Lerner says the link to Satoshi can’t be proven. It rests, he wrote in 2020, on “unsigned emails and not math, we’ll never be sure.” He calls the miner “Patoshi” instead.

Strategy is the largest holder that reports its own total. The company, which changed its legal name from MicroStrategy Incorporated in August 2025, held about 848,517 bitcoin as of October 25, 2026, according to its SEC filing. It paid $64.02 billion for them, an average of about $75,446 each. That’s about 4.2% of all bitcoin mined.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust is close behind. As of October 28, 2026, it held 814,715 bitcoin, worth about $65.62 billion, according to BlackRock’s holdings file. That’s about 4.1% of all bitcoin mined.

The US government may hold a large amount too, but it’s not in this count. The executive order creating the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve says only that the government holds “a significant amount” of bitcoin.

The remaining 17.3 million or so are spread across exchanges, other funds and companies, governments and individuals, most of which don’t publish a total.

How Much Bitcoin Does the US Government Hold?

The US is often called the world’s largest government holder of bitcoin. How much it actually holds depends on who’s counting, and what they count.

The government’s coins come from law enforcement, not purchases. They were seized in cases involving dark web markets, hacks and fraud. For years, the government sold much of what it seized. Arkham estimates it sold close to 195,000 bitcoin over time, including about 174,000 from Silk Road auctions in 2014 and 2015.

That changed on March 6, 2025. Executive Order 14233 created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, funded with bitcoin forfeited in criminal and civil cases, and said that bitcoin placed in the reserve “shall not be sold.” It also ordered every agency to give the Treasury a full accounting of its digital assets within 30 days. But the order itself gives no total. It says only that the government holds “a significant amount” of bitcoin.

No official total has been published since. What exists instead are counts that each cover something different.

Five counts of US government bitcoin

The highest count is more than 11 times the lowest. Neither is wrong. The Marshals’ figure covers only bitcoin they formally own. It leaves out coins still sitting in FBI or DEA wallets while court cases continue. Arkham’s 2026 figure includes all of those. Other agencies, including the FBI, IRS, DEA and Justice Department, don’t regularly publish their crypto balances.

The gap caused real confusion. When the Marshals’ figure came out in July 2025, Senator Cynthia Lummis wrote on X that she was “alarmed by reports that the U.S. has sold off over 80% of its Bitcoin reserves,” calling it, if true, “a total strategic blunder.” Arkham then clarified that the government still held at least 198,012 bitcoin across agencies.

The jump since then came mostly from one case. In October 2025, the Justice Department filed to seize 127,271 bitcoin linked to Prince Group founder Chen Zhi, which Arkham describes as the largest forfeiture in the department’s history. The case is still going through the courts.

The reserve has also kept coins that would otherwise have been sold. A court approved the sale of 69,370 bitcoin seized from a Silk Road hacker known as “Individual X” in January 2025. According to Arkham, the reserve order took that stash off the market before any sale happened.

The order also allows the government to buy more bitcoin, but only in ways that are “budget-neutral” and cost taxpayers nothing. As of mid-2026, no bitcoin had been bought this way, according to Arkham.

So the honest answer is somewhere between about 29,000 and 328,000 bitcoin, depending on what counts as “held.” Until the government publishes its own total, every figure is an outside estimate.

Numbers That Don’t Survive Checking

Bitcoin’s supply is one of the most checkable numbers in finance. Yet many of the figures quoted about it come from summaries of summaries. Traced back to their sources, these ones fall apart.

• “The Bitcoin whitepaper caps supply at 21 million.” It doesn’t. The whitepaper says new coins are created as a reward for each block, and that the reward can switch to fees “once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation.” It never names 21 million or describes halvings. The cap comes from Bitcoin’s code.
• “Chainalysis found 3.7 million bitcoin are lost.” The 2020 coverage of Chainalysis’ research gives about 20% of supply, not a coin count. The 3.7 million appears to be others working out 20% of the roughly 18.6 million bitcoin mined at the time. Chainalysis’ earlier 2017 estimate was a range: 2.78 to 3.79 million.
• “As of early 2025, 2.3 to 3.7 million bitcoin are lost, according to Chainalysis.” Ledger’s guide makes this claim. But the Chainalysis estimates found are from 2017 and 2020, and neither gives 2.3 to 3.7 million. The figure looks misdated or misquoted.
• “Ledger estimated 2.3 to 3.7 million lost in 2025.” BitGo’s guide lists this as a separate estimate. But Ledger was citing Chainalysis, so the same research ends up counted twice.
• “Unchained estimates up to 3.8 million lost.” The figure itself may be right, but its date isn’t settled. Bankrate calls it a 2023 report. BitGo dates it to April 2026.
• “Satoshi Nakamoto owns 1.1 million bitcoin.” That’s an attribution, not a fact. The coins were linked to Satoshi by a mining pattern. Sergio Demian Lerner, the researcher who found it, says the link rests on “unsigned emails and not math, we’ll never be sure.”
• “Satoshi’s coins have never moved.” Too absolute. Arkham’s own page, which uses that phrase, also says that apart from “occasional test transactions,” no coins definitively linked to Satoshi have moved since the early days.
• “The US sold over 80% of its bitcoin and has only about 29,000 left.” That reading came from a US Marshals Service figure of 28,988 bitcoin in July 2025. But it covered only coins the Marshals formally own. It left out bitcoin held by other agencies while court cases continue.
• “The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve holds 328,372 bitcoin.” That number is a tracker’s estimate of all US government holdings, including coins still tied up in court. Even CoinPedia, which reported it, calls it “not an audited Treasury statement.”

What nobody publishes

For a currency built on a public ledger, a surprising amount of bitcoin’s story is missing. These are the numbers that should exist, but don’t.

The biggest gap is the US government’s own total. The executive order that created the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve required every agency to give the Treasury a full accounting of its digital assets within 30 days. No total has been made public. The only official figure, 28,988 bitcoin, came from a Freedom of Information Act request to the US Marshals Service, and it covers only coins the Marshals formally own. Other agencies, including the FBI, IRS, DEA and Justice Department, don’t regularly publish their crypto balances.

Other governments are harder still to pin down. Arkham notes that China’s wallets aren’t as transparently tracked as those of the US or UK. China seized about 190,000 bitcoin in 2019, which is widely thought to have been sold, but that hasn’t been confirmed.

There’s also no current estimate of lost bitcoin. The Chainalysis figures still quoted most often date from 2017 and 2020, and the 2017 study kept its full method confidential. Fidelity Digital Assets measures how much bitcoin hasn’t moved in 10 years or more, but it doesn’t say how much of that is actually lost.

And no one has proven who owns the coins linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. They were tied to Satoshi through a mining pattern, never through a signed message or a transaction he confirmed.

So the total number of bitcoin can be counted down to the last coin. How much of it anyone can actually use, and who holds the rest, can only be estimated.

How to check it yourself

Bitcoin’s supply is public, so most of this article can be checked in a few minutes. Holdings change daily, so expect newer figures than the ones here.

1. Bitcoin mined so far (20,105,475). Open Blockchain.com’s “Total Circulating Bitcoin” chart. Hover over a date to see that day’s total.
2. The 21 million cap and exact maximum. Read Unchained’s “How does the bitcoin source code define its 21 million cap?” It walks through the code and shows every reward added up to 20,999,999.9769. Developer Pieter Wuille’s lower estimate is in the same article.
3. The halving schedule. Read the “Halving” entry in Blockstream’s glossary. It lists each reward from 50 down to 3.125 bitcoin, the 2024 halving at block 840,000, the drop to about 450 new bitcoin a day, and the end of new coins around 2140.
4. How new bitcoin is created. Read section 6, “Incentive,” of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
5. Strategy’s holdings (848,517). Find Strategy’s latest Form 8-K on the SEC’s website. The total is under “ATM and BTC Update.” The filing also points to a dashboard on Strategy’s website.
6. BlackRock’s IBIT holdings (814,715). Open the fund’s holdings file on BlackRock’s website. Find the row marked “BTC” and read the “Units” column. The date is at the top.
7. Satoshi’s coins (about 1.096 million). Read Arkham’s Satoshi Nakamoto research page. For the original 2013 estimate, read Sergio Demian Lerner’s “The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto” on Bitslog. His caution about the link to Satoshi is in the first paragraphs of “The Patoshi Mining Machine.”
8. Lost bitcoin. For Chainalysis’ 2017 estimate, read Fortune’s “Lost Bitcoins.” For the 2020 figure, read The Block’s report on Chainalysis’ research. For coins untouched for 10 years or more, read Fidelity Digital Assets’ “The Increasing Impact of Bitcoin’s Ancient Supply.”
9. US government bitcoin. Read Executive Order 14233 in the Federal Register. Section 3 covers the reserve, and section 4 the 30-day accounting. For outside estimates, read Arkham’s “U.S. Government Bitcoin Holdings 101,” which also explains the US Marshals’ 28,988 figure.

Several figures here come from companies that sell blockchain analysis or bitcoin services, including Arkham, Chainalysis, Unchained and Fidelity Digital Assets. Their estimates are useful, but they’re their own, not official counts. For who holds crypto in the US, see how many Americans own crypto, and for every other coin, how many cryptocurrencies there are.

Sources

Every figure above traces to one of these.

1. Blockchain.com, Total Circulating Bitcoinblockchain.com
2. Unchained, How does the bitcoin source code define its 21 million cap?unchained.com
3. Blockstream, Halvinghelp.blockstream.com
4. Strategy Inc, Form 8-K, October 26, 2026sec.gov
5. Strategy Inc, Strategy Announces Legal Name Change from MicroStrategy Incorporated to Strategy Incbusinesswire.com
6. BlackRock, iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF: Fund Holdingsblackrock.com
7. Arkham, Satoshi Nakamoto Net Worthinfo.arkm.com
8. Fortune, Lost Bitcoinsfortune.com
9. The Block, Less than 20% of the current supply of bitcoin is used for trading, says Chainalysistheblock.co
10. Federal Register, Executive Order 14233: Establishment of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpilegovinfo.gov
11. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash Systembitcoin.org
12. NPR, Finding Your Lost Bitcoinsnpr.org
13. Yahoo Finance (Bankrate), Lost bitcoins may not be gone foreverfinance.yahoo.com
14. Fidelity Digital Assets, The Increasing Impact of Bitcoin’s Ancient Supplyfidelitydigitalassets.com
15. Bitslog (Sergio Demian Lerner), The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Geniusbitslog.com
16. Bitslog (Sergio Demian Lerner), The Patoshi Mining Machinebitslog.com
17. Arkham, U.S. Government Bitcoin Holdings 101info.arkm.com
18. Cryptopolitan, U.S. government still holds at least 198,000 BTC, Arkham clarifies US Marshal disclosure meltdowncryptopolitan.com
19. BBC, ‘A pig in lipstick’: Trump’s strategic Bitcoin reserve criticisedbbc.com
20. CoinPedia, U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: Why 328,372 BTC Isn’t the Full Storycoinpedia.org
21. Ledger, How Many Bitcoin Are Lost?ledger.com
22. BitGo, How Many Bitcoins Are Lost? Estimates, Causes, and What It Means for Supplybitgo.com