Quote from: shorena on August 31, 2014, 10:42:42 PM

The total amount of bitcoin is hardcoded to be less than 21 million BTC . . .

FTFY

Quote from: pringbit on August 31, 2014, 11:02:25 PM

Exactly 20999999.9769 millions, take a look at the bitcoin wiki . . .
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

FTFY. Note that some have been permanently destroyed, so the total in existence when all mining is complete will be less than 20999999 BTC.

Quote from: AceWallen on September 01, 2014, 02:45:37 AM

keep in mind, however, that this hard limit can always be changed by altering the source code, should devs decide to do that. in the case of such a fork, it would be up to the miners to prevent the new fork from developing, and to keep the old code intact.

Bitcoin operates on the consensus of the users, not the majority of the miners. Every user running a full node (such as Bitcoin Core) enforces the protocol rules on the entire system. If a forking change were made to the protocol, those users (and miners) that chose to use the new code would essentially be creating an altcoin (which they might want to try and call "bitcoin", but which wouldn't actually be "bitcoin" unless ALL users and miners switched to software running the new protocol). If even one user and one miner continue to run the old protocol, then the original bitcoin rules would still exist on the original bitcoin network.

Quote from: santaClause on September 01, 2014, 06:44:15 AM

This number will technically be a little bit less due to the fact that some TXs have outputs that were sent to unspendible addresses.

TXs sent to unspendable addresses still exist and can be seen in the blockchain. They may never be spent, but it doesn't change the total amount that exist. On the other hand, there were some bitcoins early on that were accidentally destroyed by a miner running faulty code. Those bitcoins no longer exist at all, and never will. It wasn't very many, but it could happen again in the future.

Quote from: oceans on September 01, 2014, 12:51:08 PM

. . . how many there are still out there to be mined I am not sure a solid answer can be given on that but as stated above I do know that there are less than 21 million out there . . .

FTFY. Also, as of the time of this post, approximately 13.216 million have been mined so far. This leaves approximately 7.784 million more that have not yet been mined.

Quote from: jeroenn13 on September 01, 2014, 01:28:32 PM

Fixed 21 million BTC will be mined.

Nearly, but not quite. The total number that should have been mined was 20999999.9769 BTC. A bit less than this will actually be mined due to a bug in a miner's code early on that permanently destroyed some bitcoins from existence.

Quote from: ensurance982 on September 01, 2014, 03:06:01 PM

Yeah, less than 21 million like the other people already stated. It's amazing to think about how more than half of those coins are already in existence even though only about 5 years have passed since Bitcoins initial conception. The last coins will me mined decades from now... It's crazy!

FTFY. Also, It's closer to 6 years than 5 years now. The last coins will be mined more than a century from now.

Quote from: MinerHQ on September 01, 2014, 03:27:50 PM

21 mil whole ones, infinity decimal ones Grin

No. See my other responses in this post.