The Bitcoin Halving Event is Here!

Update: Bitcoin’s 630,000 block was mined this afternoon!

In a nod to Satoshi Nakamoto‘s inscription on Bitcoin’s genesis block (“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”), mining pool F2Pool put the recent New York Times Headline (“NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue”) as the message in the last block before the halving:

The final Bitcoin block with a subsidy of 12.5 BTC was mined by @f2pool_official and contained the following message in its coinbase transaction:

?NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescuehttps://t.co/9dtTrC8YH6

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) May 11, 2020

Until next time:

Just 1,458 days until the next BTC halvening!

— Michael Arrington (@arrington) May 11, 2020

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At around 12pm PST today, Bitcoin’s Halving Event, aka the “Halvening,” will occur, with Bitcoin mining rewards being decreased from 12.5 BTC per block mined to 6.25 BTC.

This is the third time that this has happened, as mining rewards are halved every 210,000 blocks. Blocks are mined every ten minutes.

Bitcoin began with a 50 BTC block reward, which was reduced to 25 BTC in November 2012, and then to it’s currently 12.5 BTC level in July 2016. The reward will decrease until it hits zero and all 21 million Bitcoin have been mined (approximately the year 2140).

Bitcoin’s price hit a new all time high within 1-2 years after the previous two halvings. There has been a large increase in interest around the event, highlighted by Google Search Results:

Google searches for "bitcoin halving" have exceeded 300% of the volume seen before the 2016 halving event. https://t.co/jNQ9hawZYi pic.twitter.com/tBIQRhsiay

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) May 8, 2020

Once this halving occurs, the clock will reset for the next halving for sometime in 2024.