Every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years, Bitcoin's new-coin issuance rate is cut in half. This has happened four times. The fourth halving fired April 19, 2024 at block 840,000, cutting the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Here is the schedule, the historical effects, and the math on what happens when issuance eventually approaches zero.
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Bitcoin has a hard-coded issuance schedule. Every 210,000 blocks, the amount of new Bitcoin paid to miners is cut in half. This is what makes Bitcoin's total supply mathematically capped at 21 million coins. Four halvings have already happened. In 2026 new issuance is 3.125 BTC per block, roughly 450 BTC minted per day, down from 900 before April 2024 and from 1,800 a decade ago. By 2140 the reward approaches zero and miners will be paid in transaction fees alone.
Bitcoin's block reward is not set by any central authority. It is a single line in the consensus rules: every 210,000 blocks, cut the coinbase reward in half. Nodes enforce this by rejecting any block that pays the miner more than the schedule allows.
Why 210,000? At a ten-minute block interval, 210,000 blocks takes about 3.99 years. Satoshi wanted an issuance curve that mimicked gold's disinflationary profile on a human timescale, with predictable step-downs rather than a smooth decay. The specific choice of 210,000 has no special mathematical meaning beyond yielding a roughly four-year cadence and a total supply that sums to 21,000,000.
21,000,000 is not an arbitrary round number. It falls out of the math. 50 BTC per block for 210,000 blocks, then halving infinitely in geometric series, converges to exactly 21,000,000 minus rounding losses from integer-only arithmetic. The cap is a mathematical consequence of the schedule, not a separate rule.
A pattern is visible in the post-halving price action of all three completed cycles: the price tends to peak 12 to 18 months after the halving, then correct sharply. Whether the pattern holds for cycle four is open at the time of writing. See the halving-2024 deep dive for the full cycle-by-cycle comparison.
Halving five fires at block 1,050,000. At current block times that lands in roughly April 2028 [VERIFY]. The block reward will drop from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC. Daily new issuance will fall from roughly 450 BTC to roughly 225 BTC.
Keep halving a number and it never quite reaches zero, but Bitcoin uses integer arithmetic at the satoshi level (one satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC). That rounds issuance to zero once the reward falls below one satoshi. At the current schedule this happens around block 6,930,000, projected for the year 2140.
By early 2026, roughly 19.9 million of the 21 million coins have already been mined [VERIFY]. Only about 1.1 million coins remain to be issued over the next 114 years. Most of them arrive in the next few halvings. By the seventh or eighth halving, new issuance per block is a rounding error next to transaction fees.
This is why Bitcoin is described as disinflationary by design. Each halving cuts the new-supply growth rate roughly in half. The inflation rate of Bitcoin falls below the inflation rate of gold at the fifth halving and keeps falling.
Stock-to-flow is the ratio of total existing supply ("stock") to annual new supply ("flow"). Gold's stock-to-flow sits around 60. Bitcoin's jumped past gold's at the 2020 halving and will double again at every subsequent halving. Some analysts argue this scarcity metric is the primary driver of Bitcoin's long-run price. See Stock-to-Flow for the full framing and its critics.
Whatever the mechanism, the observed pattern across three cycles is that the year following each halving has produced a new all-time high price, followed by a drawdown of 70 to 85 percent. The cycle-four deep dive is at Bitcoin Halving 2024.
Last updated 2026-04-14. Not financial advice. Do your own research.