Bitcoin blocks are added to the shared ledger roughly every ten minutes. At the birth of the network, the block reward was programmed to be 50 bitcoins per block. Every four years, roughly, or after 210,000 blocks have been issued, the block reward drops by half. The first halving happened on November 28, 2012, after which the issuance of new bitcoins dropped to 25 per block. On July 9, 2016, it dropped again to 12.5 coins per block, and will drop to 6.25 in 2020. According to this schedule, the supply will continue to increase at a decreasing rate, asymptotically approaching 21 million coins
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