Bitcoin mining

The block creation time for Bitcoin is 10 minutes. Miners get rewards when new blocks are created and are also paid the transaction fees considering the blocks contain the transactions that are included in the block mined. The block time is maintained at 10 minutes, which makes sure blocks are created at a fixed rate. The reward for the mining of blocks is halved every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years. When Bitcoins were initially introduced, the block reward was 50 Bitcoins, which was halved in 2012 to 25 Bitcoins. In July 2016, the reward for mining each block was again halved to 12.5 coins. The next date for reducing the block reward is July 2020, which will reduce the coin reward to roughly 6.25 coins.

Due to the halving event, the total number of Bitcoins in existence will not be more than 21 million. The decreasing supply was chosen as it is similar to other commodities such as gold and silver. The last Bitcoin will be mined in 2140, and no new mining reward will be present after that, although the transaction fees would still be awarded for generations of blocks containing transaction fees.