The once in four years event saw the Bitcoin mining reward (block validation) going down by 50% to 6.25 BTC, from 12.50 BTC.
Bitcoin’s third halving event happened at 3:23 pm EST Monday, as per data from Tradeblock.com. Following the halving event, Bitcoin, at the time of writing this article, was trading at $8,747, reflecting a gain of 0.7%, indicating a market dominance of 67%, as per Coin360.
As mentioned earlier, this is the third halving event, interestingly, after the first Bitcoin block was generated in 2009.
The event, happening after every the completion of every 210,000 blocks, results in halving the mining reward by 50%.
Usually, it takes about four year for the valdating 210,000 blocks. At the end of the first Bitcoin halving in 2012, the block reward was cut from 50 BTC to 25 BTC.
The reward was further decreased to 12.5 BTC, from 25 BTC at the end of second halving event which took place in 2016.
As the supply is limited to 21 million coins, Bitcoin halving events are expected to continue until 2140 or until the creation of the 21-millionth BTC.
Notably, at that time, block reward would go down to 1 satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC). Currently, 18.375 million Bitcoins are in circulation as per data provided by blockchain.com.
The earlier halving events had considerable effect on the price of Bitcoin and so this time around, there was heavy speculation regarding the price trend.
While some of them had forecast no major impact on Bitcoin price, following the halving event, some of them had predicted a significant impact on the price due to a reduction in Bitcoin supply.
Even though there is no concrete evidence of correlation between Bitcoin price and halving event, still, it has a straight forward impact on miners.
Several cryptocurrency professionals forecast that the latest halving will motivate miners to stop generating new Bitcoin as a large number of mining gadgets will turn out to be obsolete.
As per mining pool Poolin’s vice president, Alejandro De La Torre, a several unprofitable miners had started turning off their mining hardware before the halving even took place yesterday.