We have said that there will be a maximum of around 21 million bitcoins (or 21 million per hundred million satoshis) in circulation. But how are these bitcoins "produced"?
We are often led to believe that bitcoins are generated from nothing thanks to a computer, and that anyone can create them with extreme ease.
This idea is typically spread by Bitcoin technology detractors, out of ignorance or resentment towards an alternative and competing monetary system compared to the current one.
Bitcoin undermines the role of the Dollar as the main medium of global exchange and it is therefore understandable that those with interests in maintaining the status quo spread these falsehoods.
Bitcoins are not generated from nothing but assigned by the software running on the system nodes (see the chapter "What is a Bitcoin node?").
This software put new bitcoins in circulation on average every 10 minutes, ie every transaction block found.
I realize that this sentence is complex so let's try to clarify the concept of transactions and blocks before arriving at the generation of new bitcoins.
Those who participate in the Bitcoin network can send transactions to each other: Alice can send Bob any amount of bitcoins in her possession. Alice's transaction to Bob is propagated, starting from the Alice node to all the nodes of the network, and temporarily stored inside them in what is called Mempool, a temporary memory. Each node of the network has its own Mempool.