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Sometime in the next day or two, BSV miners will produce block 940,000, pushing the total coin supply past 20,000,000. That leaves just 1 million bitcoins left to be mined from the block subsidy. Ever.
It is a quiet milestone. No fireworks, no protocol upgrade, no contentious fork. The network just keeps ticking along, block after block, exactly the way it was designed to work in 2008. But the math is worth pausing to appreciate, because Satoshi Nakamoto’s supply schedule is one of the most elegant pieces of economic engineering ever deployed.
The math
Bitcoin‘s issuance follows a halving cycle. Every 210,000 blocks, the block reward is cut in half. The first era paid miners 50 coins per block. Then 25. Then 12.5. Then 6.25. Right now, in the fifth era that began at block 840,000, miners earn 3.125 BSV per block.
Here is how the total supply stacks up across eras:
– Era 1 (blocks 0 to 209,999): 10,500,000 BSV
– Era 2 (blocks 210,000 to 419,999): 5,250,000 BSV
– Era 3 (blocks 420,000 to 629,999): 2,625,000 BSV
– Era 4 (blocks 630,000 to 839,999): 1,312,500 BSV
– Era 5 (blocks 840,000 to 1,049,999): 656,250 BSV total when complete
Block 940,000 sits exactly 100,000 blocks into the fifth era. At 3.125 coins per block, that is 312,500 new BSV added to the 19,687,500 produced in the first four eras—the sum: 20,000,000 on the nose.
As of March 10, 2026, the chain tip is at block 939,762. That puts us roughly 238 blocks away from the milestone, which, at the current average block pace, should land around March 11 or 12.
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Disinflation by design
The word “deflationary” gets thrown around a lot in Bitcoin circles, but Bitcoin’s supply model is technically disinflationary. New coins are still being created. They are just being created at an ever-decreasing rate. The annual inflation rate of BSV right now is well under 1%, and it will keep dropping with each subsequent halving until the subsidy hits zero around the year 2140.
Compare that to the U.S. dollar, which has lost over 97% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. The dollar’s supply expands whenever political incentives say it should. Bitcoin’s supply expands on a fixed schedule that no committee, no central bank, and no emergency session of Congress can alter. That is the whole point.
Sound money advocates have argued for centuries that a reliable monetary supply is the foundation of honest commerce. Gold served that function for thousands of years because it was hard to produce and impossible to conjure out of thin air. Bitcoin inherited that principle and made it mathematically enforceable. Twenty million coins exist today because the protocol says so. Twenty-one million will exist eventually because the protocol says so. Nobody gets to call an audible.
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Scarcity is only half the story
But here is where I will gently push back on the “number go up” crowd: scarcity by itself does not make something valuable. I can put a pebble in a jar, declare that only one of them will ever exist, and it is still a pebble. Scarcity is a feature, not a value proposition. The value proposition has to come from utility.
This is where BSV’s story gets interesting, and where I think the 20 million coin milestone matters more on this chain than on others. BSV processes massive blocks, handles tens of thousands of transactions, supports micropayments at fractions of a cent, stores data on-chain, enables token issuance, and runs smart contracts at scale. It is doing the work described in the original Bitcoin white paper: peer-to-peer electronic cash.
A scarce asset that nobody uses is a collectible. A scarce asset that millions of transactions flow through every day is money. The gap between those two things is the gap between a novelty and an economy.
BSV is currently processing more daily transactions than most chains people talk about on X/Twitter, and it does so at fees so low they round to zero. That is the context in which “only a million coins left” actually means something. It is not just scarcity for the sake of scarcity. It is a hard cap on the supply of working payments and the data network.
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What comes next
The remaining 1 million BSV will take considerably longer to mine than the first 20 million. The halving schedule ensures that. The next halving will cut the reward to 1.5625 BSV per block. The one after that: 0.78125. Each era stretches the remaining supply further into the future, and as the subsidy shrinks, transaction fees gradually become a larger share of miner revenue. That is the transition Satoshi designed: from subsidy-funded security to fee-funded security, made possible by high transaction volume on big blocks.
We are watching that transition happen in real time on BSV. The block at height 939,762 carried 1,270 transactions. Some recent blocks have pushed past 3,000. As the subsidy continues to fall, those fees add up, and the economic model that Satoshi described in Section 6 of the white paper starts to look less like theory and more like Thursday.
Of course, we need to do better. Those blocks could hold millions, or even billions of transactions, and as the subsidy runs out, they will need to! But this article isn’t a doomer. It’s a quick celebration!
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A simple celebration
This is not the kind of milestone that calls for grand pronouncements. It is more like an odometer rolling over. But it is worth a nod, because 20 million out of 21 million means the era of abundant new coin supply is behind us. What remains is a slow trickle stretched across the next century-plus.
For anyone building on BSV, using BSV, or mining BSV, the message is straightforward: the asset you are working with is getting scarcer on a fixed schedule, and the network it runs on keeps getting busier. That is a combination worth paying attention to.
Block 940,000 is coming—only a million left.
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This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/only-a-million-bitcoins-left/
