Bitcoin: Block rewards and inflation are now halved
The fourth Bitcoin halving took place at the weekend. As a result, fewer bitcoins are coming into circulation. So far, however, miners don't care much.
(Bild: kitti Suwanekkasit/Shutterstock.com)
The 840,000th Bitcoin block was mined in the night from Friday to Saturday. This marked the fourth so-called halving: Since then, miners have only received half as much reward per block mined – 3.125 BTC instead of the previous 6.25. This happens every 210,000 blocks until the rewards are set to 0.
From this, the changed inflation can be reliably calculated, which has now fallen from around 1.7 to 0.85 percent. Inflation is largely constant because the Bitcoin protocol is designed in such a way that a new block is mined every ten minutes on average. The algorithm constantly adjusts the hashing difficulty: Depending on how many mining chips are running in the network, the complexity of the required validation hashes becomes simpler or more complex.
Miners do mining things
There has been no mining exodus so far. Mining performance in the Bitcoin network has only dropped from around 650 exahashes per second to just under 630 –, which is within the usual fluctuations. Even during the three previous halvings, there were only short-term drops, if any at all. However, price slumps have a greater impact on mining.
Analysts hope that the halving will lead to rising prices – first for Bitcoin and then for other cryptocurrencies if investors distribute BTC profits to Ethereum, for example. Since Saturday, Bitcoin has risen by a few percent to just over 62,000 euros. This means that the cryptocurrency is still within the price fluctuations of recent weeks.
The all-time high reached 67,400 euros on March 14, 2024. Since then, sentiment on the financial markets has deteriorated, including the stock markets, partly due to the global war and cautious forecasts from some semiconductor companies.
(mma)