Food, drink and incredibly dense visualizations of bitcoin data were on-hand last night at a New York bitcoin "halving party" co-hosted by investment firm Digital Currency Group and UK banking giant Barclays.
The otherwise rare combination of food, fun and geeky bitcoin trivia will likely be seen with increasing frequency at events popping up all over the world between the time of publication and sometime on Saturday (or maybe early Sunday), when the reward that miners are paid for transaction verification on the distributed network is cut in half.
While the prospect of a decreasing incentive to mine bitcoins and ensure the soundness of the network may seem like reason to be concerned, this is all part of a design to limit the amount of cryptocurrency in circulation and theoretically control inflation.
Still, the co-host of last night’s event said the events cropping up spontaneously around the world are evidence that bitcoin first caught on not because it was an exciting and intricate new technology, but because people found a common interest in the cryptocurrency’s philosophy of decentralization.
Digital Currency Group director Meltem Demirors told CoinDesk: "Bitcoin was and still is a technological experiment and a social experiment. It started as a community of people who really felt passionate about the underlying philosophical principals of bitcoin and it still is." Likely, a search online wherever you live will turn up some small clan of bitcoiners gathering to mark the occasion, forecast by TheHalvening.com to occur on 9th July at 17:14:02 GMT.
But we’ve identified a few that stand out as notable for various reasons, regardless of where you live. (Hat tip to The Halvening for assembling this list of halving parties around the world). Argentina
Earlier this week, we reported that Uber’s Argentina subsidiary is now doing business with bitcoin wallet Xapo as a […]
