Daily Issuance

Bitcoin Daily Issuance plots the protocol-determined supply emission over the entire price history, on a logarithmic axis so every halving step reads at the same visual amplitude. The top panel is the BTC count per day — a clean step function with vertical jumps at 2012-11-28, 2016-07-09, 2020-05-11, and the most recent halving in April 2024. The bottom panel is the same flow multiplied by daily close, and the inflation strip alongside is the BTC flow annualised against the circulating supply.

Today’s BTC count is 450 BTC per day, worth $35.19M at the live $78,199.03 spot. The annualised inflation rate is 0.8% — well below the historical gold mining rate of ~1.5% and far below every major fiat currency. The shape of the BTC panel is the policy in full: four halvings down, twenty-eight to go.

Three identities, one schedule. For every day d:

btc(d) = reward(d) × 144
usd(d) = btc(d) × price(d)
inflation(d) = (btc(d) × 365) / supply(d)

The reward is fixed by block height. Every 210,000 blocks — roughly four years at the protocol’s 10-minute target — the per-block reward halves. The schedule is hard-coded in GetBlockSubsidy() and visible in every full node’s consensus rules. There is no policy committee. There is no emergency override. The reward halves until it rounds down to zero around the year 2140 — at which point the asymptote at 21 million BTC is reached and the protocol’s monetary expansion ends.

144 blocks per day is the target cadence, not a guarantee. Block times follow a Poisson process with a 10-minute mean; difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks to keep the mean centred. Over any month the realised cadence typically sits in a 140–148 block band. Daily issuance moves with it: a faster-than-target month emits a few percent more BTC than the schedule’s nominal figure; a slower month emits a few percent less.

Supply is the cumulative count of all reward-and-fee outputs ever issued (less coinbase transactions sent to provably unspendable addresses). It grows monotonically. The first 99% of the eventual 21 million is mined before 2036; the remaining 1% stretches over the following century, with daily issuance vanishing toward zero. The full derivation, including the choice of calendar versus block-height projection for the “days until halving” figure, is documented on the methodology page.

The top panel is the only piece of the chart that is truly Bitcoin monetary policy. Every halving is a half-decade vertical drop in log space; the step shape reads cleanly across sixteen years of history because the y-axis compresses the early 7,200 BTC/day era onto the same visual band as today’s 450. On a linear axis the early era would dwarf everything since 2016 and the chart would lose its narrative.

The USD panel tells a very different story: even though BTC/day has fallen 16× since 2012 (from 7,200 to 450), the dollar value of that flow has risen roughly four orders of magnitude. That is the entire miner-economics thesis in a single chart — subsidy compression plus price appreciation, with the latter outpacing the former until a halving forces the industry to re-price. Every halving has been followed by a USD-revenue trough that lasted six to eighteen months, then a recovery.

The inflation strip is the cleanest read of the three. It steps down at every halving (the new lower issuance overnight cuts the numerator in half), then bleeds slowly through the following era as the denominator continues to grow. Today’s 0.8% reading sits in the well-below-fiat regime; the next halving will roughly halve it again.

Reading the chart at every halving plus the cycle tops and lows in between is the cleanest summary of how the schedule has shaped network economics. The BTC column is fully deterministic — it depends only on which halving era the anchor sits in. The USD column moves with the spot price on the date; the inflation column reflects supply growth at that point.

The distinctive number this chart produces is not the headline inflation reading on any given day — that figure is well-trodden — but the rate at which inflation decays in the year following a halving. Every halving cuts the numerator (daily issuance) in half overnight; the denominator (circulating supply) keeps growing through the new era at the new lower rate. The result is a slow further bleed in the inflation rate, on top of the overnight cut.

The size of that further bleed has shrunk dramatically with each successive halving, because the supply base has grown. The 2012 halving took inflation from 12.5% to 11.1% over the following year — a 1.4-percentage-point additional decline. The 2024 halving took it from 0.8% to 0.8% over its following year — a 0.01-percentage-point additional decline, two orders of magnitude smaller. The annual decay is now vanishing into the noise floor.

The single most useful cross-section of this chart is the USD-revenue response across halvings. Each halving cuts BTC issuance in half; the industry’s dollar revenue then depends on whether spot has risen by the same factor. Through the first three halvings the answer was “by far more than that, eventually” — the post-halving year typically delivered a 3–10× price multiplier into the cycle top, more than offsetting the 50% subsidy cut.

The 2024 halving has been a more compressed test. At the moment of the cut, USD issuance dropped from $55.20M per day (12.5 BTC era closing rate at the day-before close) to $28.56M per day at the new 6.25-equivalent rate — the smallest first-day percentage drop of any halving in BTC terms but the largest in absolute dollar terms. Today’s flow at $35.19M per day annualises to $12.84B in subsidy revenue across the industry, before transaction fees.

The miner-economics frame is the only one where the USD panel adds signal beyond the BTC panel. For monetary-policy questions — how much new supply enters the float, what the real inflation rate is, where the schedule is heading — the BTC panel is the answer. For mining-industry questions, the USD panel is.

For a long-term holder. The chart is the entire monetary case for Bitcoin in one frame: a known, declining issuance schedule with a hard asymptote, executed by every full node in the network without exception. Pair it with stock-to-flow for the supply-side multiple, and with the halving cycles overlay for the historical price response. The USD panel is the least informative of the three for this purpose — it is dominated by spot, not by the schedule.

For a Bitcoin miner. The USD panel is the read. Subsidy revenue alone, today, is $12.84B per year across the entire industry; that figure scales with spot and steps down at every halving. The complement is the daily-fees chart — the second leg of miner revenue, currently small in proportion but projected to dominate post-2140. Subsidy compression has historically been offset by price appreciation; the next halving is the next test of that pattern.

For a researcher or analyst. The series is fully deterministic from the halving schedule and the daily-close price history — no external on-chain feed, nothing to reconcile across providers. Every cell of the cycle-anchor table and the inflation-decay table is recomputed nightly against the live data; every figure is the same one the protocol enforces. Methodology and the choice of calendar versus block-height projection are documented on the methodology page.

The USD panel is not the policy. It is price times quantity, dominated entirely by spot. A 30% drawdown halves the dollar revenue without any change to the schedule; a 30% rally doubles it. The deflationary story this chart tells lives in the BTC series and the inflation strip — the dollar overlay is for miner economics, not for monetary modelling. Treat the two panels as different questions sharing an x-axis.

The countdown drifts. The “days until next halving” number is a calendar projection — four years from the most recent halving. The actual on-chain schedule is block-based (every 210,000 blocks at the 10-minute target), and the realised halving date typically drifts a few weeks from the calendar estimate. The 2020 halving landed within 24 hours of the calendar projection; the 2024 halving landed about a month earlier than the equivalent naive +4y projection from 2020-05-11 would have suggested. The countdown is a planning number.

Subsidy is only one half of miner revenue. Transaction fees are the second leg, currently a single-digit percentage in steady state and far higher around blockspace-demand spikes (Ordinals/Inscriptions in 2023, the Runes launch in April 2024). They are not counted in the USD panel here. For the full revenue picture, read the daily-fees companion chart alongside this one. The post-2140 economy lives entirely on the fee column.

The supply asymptote is not literal zero. The integer-rounding of the satoshi-denominated reward means daily issuance reaches zero a few halvings before the calendar 2140. The 33rd halving rounds the per-block reward to zero satoshis, after which no new BTC is issued. The 21-million figure is itself a slightly low ceiling — the asymptotic geometric series totals 20,999,999.97690000 BTC if every block were mined exactly on schedule with the coinbase claimed in full, which historically has not always happened.

Canonical questions from Google’s “People also ask” for bitcoin issuance, bitcoin halving, and bitcoin inflation rate, answered against the data on this page.