2024-04-22 22:20:02
A highly anticipated recurring event, the “halving,” or halving of the rewards received by “miners” who help create bitcoins, happened on Friday. This was the fourth reduction since the launch of the digital currency.
“The fourth bitcoin halving is complete,” said the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, on the social network X (formerly Twitter). “The countdown has been reset. See you in 2028.”
Several other cryptocurrency conversion sites such as Coinbase, Crypto.com or HTX have confirmed, also on X, that the threshold has been exceeded.
The generation of bitcoin works in “blocks”, each of which contains information regarding transactions carried out in this currency. These blocks are “mined”, i.e. created by private actors who perform highly complex calculations and are rewarded in bitcoins.
Since the launch of the digital token in 2009, the bitcoin reward has been reduced by half when a certain amount of this digital currency is created. Every 210,000 blocks “mined” or created, the “halving” occurs.
Reward of 3,125 bitcoins
At a rate of one block mined every 10 minutes, halving occurs roughly every four years. Fixed since the previous “halving” in May 2020 at 6.25 bitcoins per block created, the reward given to a “miner” fell on Friday to 3.125 bitcoins.
The goal of the “halving” is to control the issuance rate of bitcoins, the total amount of which is defined at 21 million units by its mysterious creator (or creators), who answers to the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. This maximum level should be reached by 2040. More than 19 million bitcoins are already in circulation.
“By slowing the rate at which new bitcoins are created, halving helps maintain scarcity and potentially increase the value of this cryptocurrency, assuming demand remains stable or increases,” explained Matthew Weller, analyst at Forex.com, in a note published ahead of of the event.
Since the start of the year, bitcoin has increased by more than 50%, reaching an absolute record last month at $73,797. On Friday, the price of bitcoin did not react to the “halving”, as many analysts had expected, arguing that the price of the currency already had taken part in the incident for several weeks.
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