on the crypto
The third halving of the Bitcoin reward, the network's four-year benchmark and most anticipated event this year in the cryptocurrency sector, has finally happened.
In the past few hours, miners on the Bitcoin network produced the 630.000th blockade at 19:23 UTC on 11 May. This triggered the scheduled halving event, marking another milestone in the history of the currency.
The first block in the new 6,25 BTC reward mining cycle was extracted and loaded by the Chinese Antpool, the fourth largest mining pool for total computing power.
As a tribute to Satoshi Nakamoto's iconic "brink of a second bailout" message for the 2009 genesis block, f2pool, which extracted the 629.999th block (the last one before halving), included a reference to the current crisis Financial: "NYTimes 09 / Apr / 2020 With 2,3 T $ of injection, the Fed's plan far exceeds the 2008 bailout."
The third halving in Bitcoin history
Bitcoin, the world's first and largest blockchain network by market capitalization, was designed by its pseudonymous creator Nakamoto in order to reduce the mining premiums of each block by half every 210.000 blocks in order to slow down the injection of new ones currencies in the network over time.
The mining reward is an economic incentive for those who contribute computing power to protecting the network, as well as for processing transactions on the network. The halving of 2020, the third in the history of the network, means that the mining premium has now been reduced from 12,5 bitcoins per block to 6,25 units.
It fell to 25 from 50 bitcoins per block in November 2012 and further decreased to 12,5 units in July 2016.
The effect on miners
The direct consequence of this halving is that the production of bitcoins minted in one day will drop from 1.800 to 900 units. This also means that mining operators will see their total daily revenues - at the current bitcoin price it has one quotation of $ 8600 - reduced from $ 15 million to $ 8 million.
Therefore, the computing power connected to the Bitcoin network is expected to decrease significantly after halving. This is because the reduction in revenue will eliminate those mining operators who do not have efficient resources to reduce electricity costs. However, it remains to be seen how it will actually end after halving.
The difficulty of mining towards a new record
Currently, the total average power of Bitcoin in the past seven days since the previous adjustment of the mining difficulty has reached a new historical high. 121 exahashes per second (EH / s), which broke the previous record of 118 EH / s, according to data from the Chinese mining pool PoolIn.
Bitcoin's mining difficulty - a measure of how difficult it is to compete for mining prizes - is expected to rise 4,9% in about seven days to an all-time high above 16,55 trillion, based on data estimates PoolIn.