How to get the number of tokens in the Bitcoin network

Question

I am trying to query the bitcoin daemon in order to find out what's the total amount of bitcoins mined/produced so far in order to calculate the market capitalization. However, I can't seem to find any command that does that. Can anyone kindly help me with that?

Answer 1

This information can easily be calculated by the number of blocks in the chain - as 50 BTC per block were created for the first 210 000 blocks, then 25 BTC per block for the next 210 000 blocks, and so goes. Look below:

Blocks      279383
Total BTC   12.235M

Starting from 279 383 blocks you can find:

 210 000            * 50 = 10 500 000
(279 383 - 210 000) * 25 =  1 734 575

10 5000 + 1 734 575      = 12 234 575

12 234 575 which that site rounded up as "12.235M"

This is not an exact value but a close enough approximation and it seems to be what most sites are using.