EducationApril 21, 202612 min read

Bitcoin by the Numbers: 25 Stats That Explain Everything

Twenty-five verified Bitcoin statistics covering supply, price, network security, history, and scale — each sourced to primary data, not repeated from secondhand coverage.

Last verified: April 21, 2026. Every live stat is labeled "(as of April 2026)." Price and single-day change data come from the site's own historical price database, sourced from Bitstamp and CoinGecko. External stats are cited inline.

Numbers without sources are rumors. Bitcoin has a vast orbit of statistics — some precise, some approximate, some flatly invented. This post gives you twenty-five that have been checked against primary sources (the Bitcoin Core source code, blockchain data, and verifiable public records) rather than repeated from secondhand coverage.

Five categories, five stats each. Read top-to-bottom or jump to the category you care about.

Supply & Scarcity

Bitcoin is the only meaningfully scarce digital asset: its total supply is fixed by protocol rules that no single party can change. These five numbers define the terms.

### 1. The fixed supply cap

21,000,000 BTC

The hard limit on Bitcoin that will ever exist, enforced by every node running the Bitcoin Core software. The figure is not set by a policy or vote — it is the arithmetic consequence of the halving schedule applied to a 50-BTC starting subsidy (Bitcoin Core, validation.cpp; Bitcoin Wiki, Controlled supply). Because of integer truncation in the right-shift arithmetic, the asymptotic total is actually 20,999,999.9769 BTC — close enough to the canonical figure that "21 million" is the number everyone uses. Increasing the cap would require a change to Bitcoin Core that every node operator chose to run, which has no historical precedent on consensus-altering matters.

### 2. Bitcoin mined so far

~20,014,000 BTC (~95.3% of cap, as of April 2026)

Circulation as of the latest aggregator reading (bitinfocharts — Bitcoin), consistent with blockchain data showing the chain tip near block 946,000 (mempool.space — tip height). Most of the remaining issuance will take decades — 99% of all Bitcoin is projected to exist by 2032.

### 3. Bitcoin still to be mined

~986,000 BTC

The remainder until the asymptotic cap. This is 4.7% of the total supply — but it is being issued at an ever-slower rate, spread across more than a century of future halvings (Bitcoin Wiki, Controlled supply). The last satoshi will enter circulation around 2140.

### 4. New Bitcoin created per day

~450 BTC per day (as of April 2026)

At 144 blocks per day and a 3.125 BTC subsidy, the network mints roughly 450 new coins every 24 hours. The current issuance rate, as a percentage of existing supply, is about 0.8 percent annually — lower than the long-run inflation rate of gold for the first time in Bitcoin's history. After the 2028 halving, daily issuance will drop to ~225 BTC (Bitcoin Core, validation.cpp; Bitcoin Core, chainparams.cpp). On the demand side, the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs alone have absorbed daily inflows that frequently exceed the full 450-BTC daily new supply — one of the structural setups that makes the post-halving cycle behave differently from its predecessors.

### 5. Year the last satoshi will be mined

~2140

At the network's 10-minute block-time target, the 33rd halving will occur sometime around the year 2140, after which the block subsidy reaches zero and miners earn only from transaction fees (Bitcoin Wiki, Controlled supply projects May 2140). No one alive today will see it.

Price & Market

Bitcoin's price is the stat most discussed and least reliably characterized. These five numbers focus on the verifiable extremes and aggregates, not on forecasts or subjective judgments.

### 6. All-time high

$124,728 on October 6, 2025

Bitcoin's highest close to date, on Bitstamp, amid the 2025 leg of the fourth-halving cycle. Source: the site's price-history database, ingested from Bitstamp spot data. The intraday peak reached $126,272 before the session settled just below. Preceding all-time-high closes: $1,132 (November 2013, end of Era 1 cycle), $19,188 (December 2017, end of Era 3 cycle), $67,559 (November 2021, end of Era 4 cycle). Each cycle peak has exceeded the previous by 3× to 20× — but cycle lows have also held progressively higher.

### 7. Largest single-day gain in market history

+56.1% on October 28, 2011

The single biggest one-day positive move in our data set, from $2.69 to $4.20 in thin Mt. Gox-era order books. For comparison, the largest single-day gain in the institutional era (2020–present) was +19.5% on November 11, 2021. Source: historical price database, daily close-to-close series.

### 8. Largest single-day loss in market history

−48.5% on April 11, 2013

The biggest one-day negative move, during the first major post-2013-peak capitulation. A close second — and more familiar to modern readers — was the COVID "Black Thursday" move on March 12, 2020, at −39.0%. Source: historical price database.

### 9. Calendar years with positive returns

12 out of 16 complete years (2010–2025)

Computed from close-to-close changes across every full year in our dataset. Years that closed negative: 2014 (−57.5%), 2018 (−72.5%), 2022 (−65.4%), 2025 (−7.3%). The 2010–2013 runs look unreal by modern standards because liquidity was minimal — real price discovery only began at scale in 2013. Source: historical price database.

### 10. Best calendar year ever

+5,437% in 2013

From a close of $13.22 on January 1, 2013 to $732.00 on December 31, 2013. No subsequent year has matched this return — not 2017's +1,291% and not 2020's +304% — in large part because the absolute dollar scale kept compounding harder to match in proportional terms. Source: historical price database. A fundamental consequence of a fixed-supply asset is that proportional returns must shrink as the market capitalization grows: a 10× move on a $2T asset requires $18T of incremental capital inflows, which no previous asset has ever absorbed in a single year.

Network Security

Bitcoin's security budget comes from miners expending real-world energy to produce valid blocks. The five numbers in this section describe the scale of that expenditure and the protocol rules that govern it.

### 11. Current hash rate

~975 EH/s (as of April 2026)

The total computing power dedicated to securing the Bitcoin network (mempool.space — hashrate API; corroborated by bitinfocharts — Bitcoin). One exahash equals one quintillion hashes per second. At this rate the Bitcoin network performs roughly 975 × 10^18 SHA-256 operations every second — more than all Google searches, ever. Compared with the first halving in November 2012, when hash rate sat at roughly 29 gigahash per second, the network has scaled by a factor of approximately thirty-three billion.

### 12. Current mining difficulty

~135.6 trillion (as of April 2026)

The difficulty target that adjusts every 2,016 blocks to keep block production at 10 minutes on average (mempool.space — difficulty-adjustment API). Difficulty has roughly tripled since the 2024 halving. See the Difficulty Adjustment glossary entry.

### 13. Blocks mined since genesis

~946,000 blocks (as of April 2026)

The current chain tip (mempool.space — tip height). At 10 minutes per block, this is roughly 17 years of continuous operation. The next halving occurs at block 1,050,000 — about 104,000 blocks and 720 days away.

### 14. Current block subsidy

3.125 BTC per block

The reward paid to miners for each new block, following the April 2024 halving (Bitcoin Core, validation.cpp; mempool.space — block 840,000). Miners also receive transaction fees from each block, which have become a meaningful fraction of total revenue as subsidies have halved.

### 15. Target block time

10 minutes

The protocol target that the difficulty adjustment maintains every two weeks (Bitcoin Wiki, Controlled supply; Bitcoin Core, chainparams.cpp). Individual blocks come in as fast as seconds apart or as slow as an hour, but over thousands of blocks the average holds to ten minutes within statistical noise.

History & Milestones

Bitcoin's sixteen-plus-year operational record is unusual for an asset of its scale, and the milestones along the way are specific events with verifiable dates. Numbers here are historical anchors rather than current measurements.

### 16. Date of the Genesis Block

January 3, 2009

The very first block in the Bitcoin blockchain, mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, carrying an embedded headline from The Times of London (mempool.space — block 0; Bitcoin Wiki, Genesis block). See the daily data at /historical-price/2009-01-03.

### 17. The first real-world Bitcoin transaction

10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas — May 22, 2010

The date now known as Bitcoin Pizza Day. Laszlo Hanyecz posted his offer on the BitcoinTalk forum on May 17–18, 2010, and reported a successful trade five days later (bitcointalk.org, thread 137; Bitcoin Wiki, Laszlo Hanyecz). At the time the 10,000 BTC were worth about $41.

### 18. Halvings completed

4 (out of ~33 total)

November 28, 2012 (block 210,000) · July 9, 2016 (block 420,000) · May 11, 2020 (block 630,000) · April 20, 2024 (block 840,000). Each cut the per-block subsidy in half. See the Every Bitcoin Halving, Explained article for the full history.

### 19. First country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender

El Salvador — law passed June 8, 2021; took effect September 7, 2021

President Nayib Bukele introduced the Bitcoin Law at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami on June 5, 2021; it passed the Legislative Assembly three days later and entered force ninety days after publication (NPR; Wikipedia — Bitcoin in El Salvador). El Salvador remains the largest and most prominent sovereign Bitcoin holder by treasury policy. The country's experience has been closely watched by international institutions and has become a reference case in policy debates about whether other nations should follow.

### 20. Bitcoin Improvement Proposals in the official repository

193 BIPs (numbered up to BIP-443, as of April 2026)

The gap between the count (193) and the highest number (443) reflects withdrawn, rejected, or reserved numbers in the community proposal process (bitcoin/bips GitHub repository). BIPs are how changes to Bitcoin's protocol are proposed, discussed, and — occasionally — adopted.

Scale & Adoption

This final group covers how Bitcoin scales as a system — how long it has run, how much data it has produced, and the proportional consequences of its early supply schedule.

### 21. Years of continuous operation

17+ years (Genesis Block to today)

From January 3, 2009 through the current date, the Bitcoin network has produced blocks every ~10 minutes without any period of downtime longer than what the protocol itself allows (mempool.space — block 0; Bitcoin Wiki, Genesis block). No consensus-breaking bug has required a hard reset of the chain.

### 22. Days of continuous market data

5,757 trading days (2010-07-18 to 2026-04-21)

Bitcoin trades 24/7, so every calendar day since the launch of Mt. Gox on July 18, 2010 has market data. The site's price-history database stores close-to-close (and since 2011-08-18, open/high/low/close) prices for every one of those days.

### 23. Pizza Day value, then vs. now

$41 → roughly $1.25 billion

The 10,000 BTC Laszlo Hanyecz spent in May 2010 were worth $41 at the time (Bitcoin Wiki, Laszlo Hanyecz). At Bitcoin's 2025 all-time high of $124,728 (historical-price database, 2025-10-06), the same coins would be worth roughly $1.247 billion. No single transaction in history has appreciated more on paper. The point of the anecdote isn't that Hanyecz made a mistake — at the time, a Bitcoin with no liquid market was arguably not worth any more than he paid — it's that Bitcoin's path from novelty to reserve asset is visible in the gulf between the two numbers.

### 24. Total daily issuance across the four halving eras

Era 1: 7,200 BTC/day · Era 2: 3,600 · Era 3: 1,800 · Era 4: 900 · Era 5: 450

Each halving cuts daily new-supply in half (Bitcoin Core, validation.cpp). The series is geometric: the first halving era issued more new Bitcoin than every subsequent era combined. The fifth era, now in progress, will issue about 657,000 BTC across its roughly four-year span before the fifth halving.

### 25. First commercial exchange

Mt. Gox launched July 18, 2010

The first continuous order-book Bitcoin-to-USD exchange, running on a domain Jed McCaleb had registered for Magic: The Gathering cards. That date also opens the continuous market-data series in the site's historical-price database. Mt. Gox's collapse in February 2014 is a separate chapter — but the launch was the moment Bitcoin first had a price in dollars that updated in real time.

What Was Left Out, and Why

Several popular Bitcoin statistics did not make this list because they failed the two-independent-source test. Examples:

•Number of people who own Bitcoin globally. Survey-based estimates vary by a factor of 5, and address-count metrics overstate because one person often controls many addresses.
•Corporate Bitcoin treasury totals. Aggregators publish figures, but the underlying disclosures are inconsistent, non-audited, and change intra-quarter.
•Spot Bitcoin ETF assets under management. Public issuer data is available, but reconciling across eleven U.S. funds plus international listings introduces counting differences that move the total by double digits.
•Daily transactions per second. Publicly stated figures diverge depending on whether they count on-chain transactions only, or include Layer 2 (Lightning Network) payments whose volume is by design unobservable.

The numbers above were chosen specifically because they survive this filter. That is the bar worth applying to any number you see elsewhere: if a claim doesn't carry a source, or the source isn't verifiable, treat it as rumor until proven otherwise.