Quote from: DannyHamilton on October 02, 2013, 12:58:20 PM

A reasonably good understanding of the bitcoin protocol. And a decent ability to handle basic mathematics.

The subsidy that releases new bitcoins into the bitcoin network started at 5,000,000,000 satoshi.
It is reduced by half (rounding down to the nearest full satoshi) every 210,000 blocks until the subsidy is 0.
If you do the math, you'll find that the last satoshi will be mined in block number 6,930,000
So far there have been 261,273 block (as of the writing of this post).
That leaves 6,668,727 blocks until the last satoshi is mined.
The protocol adjusts the mining difficulty every 2016 blocks to attempt to keep the rate of block creation as close to 2016 blocks per fortnight as possible.
6,668,727 divided by 2016 is 3,308 fortnights.
There are 26 fortnights per year.
3,308 divided by 26 is 127 years.

Which part of that did you think I got wrong?

Quote from: nuffsaid420 on October 02, 2013, 04:57:29 AM

Let's revisit this statement in another year shall we?

If you like, sure. I don't expect the subsidy rules of the protocol to change significantly in a year, do you?

Ok, I am not exactly sure how this works, so please excuse my ignorance.
Would it not be possible to bring online with new technology some mining rigs that do Petahash/s(PT/s) soon? and after that... the machines catch up to and surpass the difficulty level?
So Bitcoin was inherently created to only give out so many BTC based on TIME not difficulty??
So even if we find ourselves with a machine that can do 600000000000 MHash/s it would still take 127 years?