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51 sats \ 2 replies \ @Coinsreporter 15 Oct \ on: AskSN: What's your hard nut to crack kind of question? 2100 sats for top most AskSN
Why can't we ever have exact 21 Million Bitcoins mined?
Because Bitcoins are not "created/made" but instead it is "distributed" through Coinbase. The total epoch with block reward as incentive are fixed to the first 34th epoch (.2140-200
Speaking of 21 millions, there could not be "21 millions Bitcoins" either in circulation or in existence, why ?
- The supply cap is less than that
- OP_Return or some other scenarios can make UTXOs unspendable
- Some Block rewards aren't fully-claimed (intentionally?)
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A Bitcoin is divisible up to eight decimal places. There are actually 2,099,999,997,690,000 (just over 2 quadrillion) of maximum possible atomic units in the bitcoin system.
The value of "1 BTC" represents 100,000,000 of these. In other words, each bitcoin is divisible by up to 108.
As the value of the unit of 1 BTC grew too large to be useful for everyday transactions, people began to negotiate with smaller units such as milli-bitcoins (MBTC) or micro-bitcoins (μBTC).
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