Why Bitcoin’s Halving Was a Boring Vindication

By July 16, 2016Bitcoin Business

An event anticipated in the bitcoin community for years came and went last week with little fanfare and, a week later, little impact. At approximately 12:48 EST, the 420,000th block on the bitcoin blockchain was mined and sealed by F2Pool , one of the largest bitcoin pools, earning its members 12.5 BTC . This marked the second halving, and the first time a miner would receive the reduced subsidy.

Programmed into bitcoin’s code, a halving event is when the subsidy for miners securing the network is cut in half. When bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto first released bitcoin, miners earned 50 BTC per sealed block. Three-and-a-half years later, or 210,000 sealed blocks, that reward was automatically cut in half.

This cut in the subsidy is bitcoin’s way of controlling the total supply of currency that will ever be released. When the last bitcoin is released in 2140, there will be a total of 21m total bitcoin in the market, though many will not be in circulation due to loss .

Heading into the event, there were predictions on what would happen, with some speculating that the price would drop immediately after to others suggesting worst-case scenarios .

But what has become clear, at least in the first week after halving, is that halving was just another day for bitcoin. Price unaffected

One of the primary expectations leading up to halving was that the price would drop due to an expected rumor-and-event cycle , whereby traders would accumulate the asset, riding the excitement up until the actual halving took place, at which point they would exit positions.

Petar Zivkovski, the director of operations at WhaleClub, for example, predicted that the smart money – institutions, professional traders, and other knowledgeable bitcoin traders – would sell their bitcoin holdings at the event.

The day before halving, the price of […]

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