Reward for bitcoin miners has been halved
Bitcoin has been ‘halved’. The reward for diggers of the digital currency has been halved compared to the previous situation. Anyone who now mines a block in the coin’s blockchain will receive 6.25BTC in return as a reward.
The coin’s halving occurred Monday night with the mining of the 630,000th block. It is the third time that the reward for miners has been halved. Such an event occurs approximately every four years. The price of bitcoin does not seem to have changed much for the time being.
The Bitcoin reward halving is one of the foundations of the original blockchain. The process is intended to guarantee the finiteness of the bitcoin supply. The halving therefore occurs every 210,000 blocks that are mined. A total of 64 halvings must take place before no more block rewards are handed out and all bitcoins are in circulation. It is estimated that this will happen around the year 2140, provided that the entire process continues as it does now.
Miners of the coin get a number of bitcoins back as a reward for every block mined. Until Monday, that was a number of 12.5 bitcoin, with a value of around 100,000 euros. Since the halving, miners have only received 6.25 bitcoin, or 53,000 euros per block. As a result, the number of bitcoins in circulation is increasing less quickly.
The previous halving of the reward took place in July 2016 and the first time was in November 2012. For the first halving, miners were paid another 50BTC. With a block reward of 12.5 bitcoin, an average of 1800 bitcoin was generated per day, but after the halving, that will only be 900.
Experts do not yet know what the halving will do to the bitcoin price. Predicting the currency’s volatile price is already difficult, but with the halving, that’s certainly the case. At previous halvings, the price fell briefly, but then quickly rose. After the previous halving, bitcoin rose in value from about 500 to 2600 euros within a year. However, much has changed since then, with its value peaking in December 2017. The cryptocurrency market has also grown, with hundreds of new coins.