Countdown to the Bitcoin Halving

This week BNC has launched a countdown to the Bitcoin Halving event. The countdown provides a range of estimates that predict the exact date and timing of the halving event. BNC’s product and data teams have created four different scenarios based on different block time metrics. Each scenario is a moving estimate and the timestamp, charts, and values shown on the page are re-calculated daily.

The countdown page includes other data related to the halving such as the percentage of bitcoins mined, the number of blocks to be mined before the halving, and data that tracks Bitcoin’s price-performance before and after the first two halving events, in 2012, and 2016.

Expected to take place in May this year, the Bitcoin Halving is a key macro event for bitcoin in 2020, with interest building steadily the closer it gets – as the fast-rising Google Trends data shows.

What is the Bitcoin Halving?

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, with no central authority. The Bitcoin network is secured by miners. Miners are specialized computers that use a consensus mechanism called “proof of work” to verify each block of bitcoin transactions.

Miners are rewarded for their work with newly-created bitcoins. This is called the block reward. This is how new bitcoins are released into the system.

A new block of transactions is added to the Bitcoin blockchain approximately every ten minutes. The miner that verifies each block receives the block reward. The current block reward is 12.5 bitcoins per block.

An average of 144 blocks are mined per day, and 12.5 new bitcoins are generated with each block. 144 x 12.5 = an average of 1,800 new bitcoins mined per day.

The number of new bitcoins that are created via the block reward is reduced by half every four years. This is known as the Bitcoin Halving. The next halving will be the third halving. This is when the current block reward of 12.5 bitcoins will reduce by half to 6.25 bitcoins.

Brave New Coin’s Crypto Conversation podcast has released three recent episodes that cover the upcoming Bitcoin Halving with expert commentary and analysis from a variety of perspectives.