The software governing bitcoin sets a cap on the overall quantity, which will never rise above 21,000,000 coins. The "mining" process, in which transactions are collected by miners and packed into blocks that are then secured by intricate cryptographic calculations, results in the creation of new coins.

For each successfully added block to the blockchain, the miners are rewarded for using up their computational resources. The reward for a block at the time of Bitcoin's introduction was 50 bitcoins; this amount is reduced by half every 210,000 blocks, which takes the network about four years to complete. The block reward is now 6.25 bitcoins after being reduced three times as of 2020.

Bitcoin has not been premined, which means that no coins have been created and/or given to the creators prior to its release to the general public. But in the early years of BTC's existence, there wasn't much rivalry among miners, which made it possible for the earliest network users to collect substantial sums of coins through routine mining: Satoshi Nakamoto is thought to be the sole owner of over a million Bitcoin.

Depending on the current hash rate and the price of Bitcoin, mining can be quite lucrative for miners.