Bitcoin has crossed the 945,000 blocks milestone, putting it past the midway point to the next Halving event. Here’s how many blocks are still to go.
Bitcoin Halving Will Occur At Block Height 1,050,000
The “Halving” is a predetermined event on the Bitcoin network that slashes the cryptocurrency’s block subsidy exactly in half. It’s periodic in nature, occurring every 210,000 blocks or about every four years. The last such event took place in 2024.
Why did Satoshi write this feature into the blockchain’s code? The answer to that lies in the role played by the block subsidy on the network. The block subsidy is the BTC compensation that miners receive whenever they add a new block to the chain. It happens to be the only way more of the cryptocurrency enters circulation, so it can be equated to the production of the asset.
If this reward remains constant, miners will keep flooding the same number of coins into the market, which can have a negative effect on the asset’s value over time. With the Halving in place, however, the production rate of the cryptocurrency keeps shrinking, thus making new tokens scarcer. This is the reason why Satoshi implemented the feature: the pseudonymous creator wanted to mitigate the inflation of the asset.
As mentioned earlier, the Halving occurs every 210,000 blocks. The next event, which will be the fifth Halving on the network, will occur at block height 1,050,000. As the countdown from NiceHash shows, Bitcoin is sitting at around 946,000 blocks right now, meaning that it’s over halfway through the 210,000-block journey to the next event.
The details related to the upcoming Halving event | Source: NiceHash
Initially, Bitcoin started out with a block subsidy of 50 BTC. After four Halving events, the reward’s value stands at 3.125 BTC today. The next Halving event, which is currently estimated to occur in November 2028, will further slash the block subsidy to 1.5625 BTC.
While the Halving is periodic, there won’t be an infinite number of instances of this event. This is due to the fact that Satoshi also put a cap on the cryptocurrency’s supply. Once miners have introduced 21 million tokens into circulation, they won’t be handed out block subsidies anymore. Past that point, Halvings would naturally lose all meaning.
The fact that there is a supply cap is a troublesome fact for miners, as they earn the majority of their income via the block subsidy. With each Halving that occurs en route to this endpoint, miners’ BTC revenue shrinks, and they have to count on the cryptocurrency’s price going up over time to sustain their USD income.
While this has worked so far, in the long run, miners will have to hope for transaction fees to grow in size enough to provide them with sufficient income on their own. For now, they are still very much dependent on the block subsidy.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is floating around $76,800, up more than 3% in the last seven days.
The price of the coin has rebounded from its drop | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView
Featured image from Dall-E, chart from TradingView.com
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