Bitcoin's Whitepaper Turns 18 With a Third of All Coins Sitting Still

Eighteen years after the paper that described it, bitcoin has issued almost every coin it ever will, and a growing slice of them simply does not move, according to data from our own node.

"I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party," Satoshi Nakamoto wrote at 2:10 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, October 31, 2008, in a post to the Cryptography Mailing List titled "Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper" [1]. The message linked to the whitepaper on bitcoin.org and listed its main properties: double-spending prevented by a peer-to-peer network, "no mint or other trusted parties," and new coins "made from Hashcash style proof-of-work" [1].

The abstract, pasted in full, opened with the aim. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without the burdens of going through a financial institution" [1]. The network followed about two months later, with the genesis block of January 3, 2009 [2].

From one email to 18,733 nodes

Mining has travelled just as far. Satoshi said he had made the proof-of-work difficulty "ridiculously easy to start with," so that "a typical PC" could generate coins within a few hours, and warned it would "get a lot harder when competition" pushed it up [6]. The genesis block and block 170 both carry a difficulty of 1 [8]. The retarget at block 973,728 on October 29, 2026 set it at about 148.36 trillion, which means each block demands roughly 148 trillion times the work of those first ones. On October 31, mempool.space estimated the network's hashrate at around 1,056 exahashes per second [10].

Price came later. The first published exchange rate appeared on October 5, 2009, when New Liberty Standard quoted $1 at 1,309.03 BTC, less than a tenth of a cent per coin [7]. On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, the first documented purchase of goods with bitcoin [11]. Mempool.space priced one bitcoin at $77,039 on October 31, 2026 [12]. At that rate the pizza coins would be worth about $770 million, and each bitcoin was worth roughly 100 million times its 2009 quote.

Activity on the chain grew on the same scale. No single day in 2009 topped 225 transactions, block rewards included, according to blockchain.com's series, which starts on January 17 that year [13]. Between September 30 and October 28, 2026, the chain averaged 718,287 transactions a day, more than 3,000 times that peak [13].

The ground rules are the ones that January 2009 email set out. "Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins," Satoshi wrote, with the amount "cut in half every 4 years" [6]. Every node still enforces that cap and that schedule, and every one of them validates a chain that starts at the same genesis block.

Almost fully issued

Applying the protocol's issuance schedule to our node's blocks gives 20,105,475 BTC issued as of 29/10/2026, or 95.7% of the 21 million cap [2]. About 894,500 BTC remain to be created over the next century or so. The next round milestone, 96%, arrives at block 991,199, roughly 17,400 blocks away, which at an average of one block every ten minutes points to late February 2027 [3]. The fifth halving, cutting the block subsidy from 3.125 to 1.5625 BTC, is set for block 1,050,000 [3].

A direct count of the UTXO set, the pool of unspent coins, matches that schedule almost exactly. Our node's October 25 snapshot counted 20,102,919.87 BTC against 20,103,150 BTC issued up to that block [4]. The 230.13 BTC gap is made of coins nobody can ever spend, which we explained in our piece on how many bitcoin exist.

A third of supply, five years still

The standout number this anniversary is how little moves. In the same snapshot, 6.88 million BTC, or 34.2% of supply, had not changed hands in more than five years [4]. Together with the previous week's reading, that is the highest share in our node's series, which begins in January 2018. It is 3.5 percentage points above the 30.7% of a year earlier and well up from 21.8% in October 2018 [4].

Source: NodeWitness HODL waves, computed from its node's UTXO set [4].

Some of those coins have never moved at all. The October 25 snapshot still holds 1.57 million BTC in outputs created before August 18, 2010, when bitcoin had no reference market price yet [5]. That figure barely shifts. It was 1.569 million a year ago and 1.571 million two years ago, so only about 2,900 BTC from that era have moved since October 2024 [5].

Dormant is not the same as lost. Our node cannot tell lost coins from long-term cold storage or custodians that simply leave them alone. What it can show is that the circulating share of supply keeps shrinking in relative terms.

Fewer, larger outputs

The number of unspent outputs has turned too. The UTXO set peaked at 188.1 million outputs on December 22, 2024, and stood at 164.6 million on October 25, 2026, down 12.5% [4]. Fewer outputs holding a larger supply means more value per output, though the count alone cannot say whether exchange consolidations, cleanup of tiny dust outputs or something else is behind it.

The whitepaper's abstract promised a network that "requires minimal structure." Eighteen years on, it is still producing a block roughly every ten minutes and has issued nearly everything it ever will.

Track the data on our HODL waves and holder distribution charts, and the countdowns to 96% of supply and the next halving. How to read coin-age bands is explained in our HODL waves guide, and more on supply lives in our Supply section.

Sources

Source type in brackets. All times UTC unless stated. Web pages for sources 1 to 5 accessed on 30/10/2026, and for sources 6 to 13 on 31/10/2026.

1. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper, The Cryptography Mailing List, October 31, 2008, 14:10 EDT. Announcement and abstract. (Primary, list archive)
2. NodeWitness, daily issuance (/api/node/issuance), protocol subsidy schedule applied to our node's blocks since the genesis block (January 3, 2009), last complete day 29/10/2026. (Primary, own data)
3. NodeWitness, 96% of supply and halving pages, and difficulty adjustment (/api/node/difficulty-adjustment), read on 30/10/2026 at block 973,841. (Primary, own data)
4. NodeWitness, HODL waves and supply check from UTXO-set snapshots (/api/market/hodl-waves/history), 2018 through block 973,007 (October 25, 2026). (Primary, own data)
5. NodeWitness, count of unspent outputs created before August 18, 2010, in the snapshots at blocks 867,655 (October 27, 2024), 920,847 (October 26, 2025) and 973,007 (October 25, 2026). (Primary, own data)
6. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin v0.1 released, The Cryptography Mailing List, January 8, 2009 (US Eastern time). Release announcement. (Primary, list archive)
7. Bitcoin Wiki, Category:History. Timeline for 2009 and 2010 (New Liberty Standard rate of October 5, 2009, Hal Finney's "Running bitcoin" post, first transaction in block 170). (Secondary, historical compilation)
8. mempool.space, block 0, block 170 and transaction f4184fc5…9e16, accessed 31/10/2026. (Primary, chain data)
9. Bitnodes, snapshots API, snapshot of 31/10/2026 at height 973,890. (Primary, reachable-node census)
10. mempool.space, mining (/api/v1/mining/hashrate/1w) and difficulty-adjustment (/api/v1/difficulty-adjustment) APIs, read on 31/10/2026 at block 973,894. (Primary, chain data)
11. Bitcoin Wiki, Laszlo Hanyecz. (Secondary, historical compilation)
12. mempool.space, prices API (/api/v1/prices), read on 31/10/2026. (Secondary, price aggregator)
13. blockchain.com, Confirmed Transactions Per Day, 2009 series and 30/09/2026 to 28/10/2026. (Secondary, chain data)

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Last updated: October 31, 2026