Exactly one year later, on May 20-21, 2020, another bitcoin halving (BTC) will occur, reducing the remuneration of miners by half. This process can have a significant impact on the price of bitcoin.
This will be the third halving on the Bitcoin blockchain: the first one took place in 2012, reducing the premium for each mined block from 50 to 25 BTC, the second reduced the award to 12.5 BTC.
It is not difficult to calculate that the next reduction for the production of a new unit will be 6.25 BTC, which will reduce both the reward for mining and inflation.
It is believed that the BTC halving takes place every four years, although in fact the interval between the reduction of payments is set at 210 thousand blocks. On average, a block is created every ten minutes, but since it is a random variable that is affected by the hashrate , it is sometimes necessary to wait more than an hour to remove the block.
Halving May 20, 2020 (the date may be slightly changed) will occur when the 630,000th block is reached. Currently, the bitcoin blockchain has about 577,000 checked blocks.
Thus, it remains to extract 53,000 blocks. To view all the statistics, you can go to the bitcoinclock site, which displays the countdown of the remaining blocks.
Today, about 1,800 coins are mined daily by miners, in a year exactly half of this amount will be mined – about 900 BTC per day.
It is impossible to intervene in this mechanism, since it is initially integrated into the bitcoin code. At first glance, from the point of view of the miners, this is definitely a drawback; on the other hand, this is an important step to reduce inflation, which leads to an increase in prices.
In the past, after the two previous halvings, Bitcoin showed a sharp increase in its value, reaching historical peaks in 2013, and then in 2017.
It is very likely that after the halving in 2020 there will be a significant increase in the price of cryptocurrency. The same can happen with Litecoin this year, since halving will take place in August 2019.
Of course, it is difficult to make predictions and evaluate price movements, but the influence of previous halvings gives us hope.
After 2020, there will be an even greater reduction in rewards at a speed of 210,000 blocks until the last BTC is produced. According to some calculations, this will happen in 2140.
Publication date 21.05.2019
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