
Bitcoin Halving Just Occured - 3ds
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/000000000000000000024bead8df69990852c202db0e0097c1a12ea637d7e96d
======
k00b
Coinbase transaction message in last mined block with 12.5 BTC subsidy:
"NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue"

[https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/629999](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/629999)

~~~
arcticbull
Ooh! Ask them about Tether! And how all the worlds crypto prices are in USDT,
which is at most 70% backed (30% seized by the feds in a money laundering
sting) and has never been audited.

~~~
csomar
Though I'm not sure why so many people were hinged about Tether (albeit the
average solidity of its peg meant it's legit); the positive effect of this is
that we now have lots of different stable USD coins: Coinbase, Gemini,
TrueUSD, Binance all have stable coins with a total cap of over $1bn. Sure
it's much less than TetherUSD $6.3bn but it's roughly 16%. Much better than
the total monopoly of tether two years ago.

~~~
koheripbal
Not a single one of those cryptos that claim to peg to the dollar is fully
capitalized.

Pricing a "market cap" for a crypto when only a tiny percentage of it is
trading in the market is not a realistic measure of value.

~~~
darawk
Yes they are. Please don't spread this nonsense:

[https://cointelegraph.com/news/trueusd-audit-shows-full-
us-d...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/trueusd-audit-shows-full-us-dollar-
backing)

Not only are many of them full backed, but they all trade extremely close to
parity with one another. Which means that they are all considered relatively
safe by the people actually holding them.

~~~
oarsinsync
> but they all trade extremely close to parity with one another. Which means
> that they are all considered relatively safe by the people actually holding
> them.

 _trading_ rather than _holding_. The people doing the trades are the ones
determining the pricing. The people holding are reducing the supply of the
asset in the market, but they're not actively participating in pricing of
trades.

~~~
darawk
The current price is the equilibrium of supply and demand. Not only are the
holders holding, but the market makers are providing liquidity at those
prices. Deep liquidity.

------
andrewla
If you're wondering why your friends who are into cryptocurrency are in a
tizzy, it's related to a model called "Stock-To-Flow" that attempts to post-
facto explain the price of Bitcoin (and other liquid assets, like gold) in
terms of the rate of production.

Proposed by PlanB [1] it is a source of constant
derision/hope/skepticism/dismissal by the Bitcoin community, and the halving
of the reward gives it its first non-backtested novel prediction.

Roughly it predicts [2] that the price will settle into a band around 30,000
USD sometime next year.

[1] [https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD](https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD)

[2] [https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-halving-will-be-
make-...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-halving-will-be-make-or-
break-for-stock-to-flow-model-planb)

~~~
petercooper
If there were any decent probability of Bitcoin being 3.5x higher in a year's
time, why wouldn't it already be getting priced in?

~~~
hanniabu
You could have said that in every bull run. You could also say that about the
S&P, if it's going to be worth more later why isn't it instantly that price
now? And it's because it simply isn't worth that now plus different investors
have different investment periods.

~~~
hlmencken
You can't invest in the s&p like that.

> Between January 1, 1963 and December 31, 2014, 1,186 index components were
> replaced by other components.

You can know an index of 500 large companies will go up but not know what
companies will be on that index in the future.

~~~
somebodythere
You can sell when a component leaves an index and buy when a component joins
the index and–guess what–that portfolio also goes up.

[https://contrarianoutlook.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/02/SPY...](https://contrarianoutlook.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/02/SPY-Price-Total-Return-Chart.png)

------
trynewideas
MarketWatch: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-is-the-bitcoin-
halvin...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-is-the-bitcoin-halving-and-
which-day-does-it-happen-2020-05-11)

What is the halving or halvening?

The event is known as the “halving” or “halvening,” and occurs every four
years, where the rewards for those who support bitcoin are slashed, quite
literally, in half.

So-called bitcoin miners expend tremendous amounts of computing power to
verify transactions and link them, digitally into a block, hence the term
blockchain. Miners on the blockchain — the digital ledger technology that
underpins the currency — receive a precise number of bitcoins for their
efforts in solving a complex puzzle.

That computing effort is at the very heart of the digital currency that was
created 11 years ago by a person, or persons, identifying themselves as
Satoshi Nakamoto.

~~~
llarsson
What does that mean in even plainer English?

Is Bitcoin now half as valuable? Did mining it get easier/harder? Less
profitable to mine, but existing Bitcoins still have same value as before?

~~~
searchableguy
mining it will result in half the reward.

~~~
llarsson
But existing Bitcoin still have the same value?

Does this mean the end of businesses that seemed to exist only to mine using
custom computers and GPUs? Because their revenue stream has been cut in half?

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
The block reward has been cut in half. So if they were mining for 0
transaction fees then their revenue would be cut in half, but nobody does
that. The actual change will thus be less than half, and it's possible
transaction fees will increase.

------
scottmsul
HN discussions from past halvings:

2012 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842947)

2016 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061618)

~~~
vmception
that is a treasure trove!

the top comment on the 2012 one was about someone seriously concerned about
the 2.8GB blockchain download to get started, and a debate about the
scalability of bitcoin.

since then:

\- light clients have been created. no mobile or desktop user worries about
blocks, keeping only references to a few prior blocks.

\- merchant services which are full nodes use pruned clients, which mean their
servers only use 25gb or so. (while the blockchain is 10 times larger)

\- compression of transactions have improved, so each tx takes up less space
on the blockchain.

\- validation time of the blockchain is much faster, even if you have to
download the whole thing from scratch

\- there is still a large and growing community of actually full nodes that do
invest in the appropriate hardware for decentralization.

\- and mining full nodes and their pools have fierce competition to keep their
constituent miners, continually distributing transaction validation even if
the pool operator is just a centralized single full node.

~~~
shobith
\- The haters have not changed their mind despite their hatred being
addressed, they've moved on to other reasons.

\- Bitcoin continues to improve.

On a serious note, that's a good summary, thank you!

~~~
vmception
Most of the criticisms seem to be around the -coin and -currency monikers, not
noticing those are skeuomorphs.

People get seem that it is an asset, but confuse themselves over its monetary
branding instead of what people can and do with it.

Many do then move the goal post to "there is no demand or intrinsic value",
which may more easily retain durable consensus with them, even though most of
the criticisms elevate this asset class to a standard higher than any
individual asset class in existence. But still related to the exchange rate,
instead of what people can and do with it.

------
mrunkel
Does anybody actually use bitcoin? And by use I mean transact actual business,
and not just speculate. You know, buying and selling real world goods and
services.

Or is it like gold reserves, people just hoard these digital numbers until
they are ready to cash out.

I'm really curious for the hoarders, if they're doing it as a hedge against
global financial collapse, how exactly do they expect to redeem their bitcoin
for anything tangible?

These are serious questions, I've given bitcoin only a minimum of thought. It
seems a great way to move value out of a closed economy like China, or for
drug dealers to move cash across borders, but who else uses it?

~~~
colechristensen
It is used as a toy, as speculation, for criminal activity, and for money
laundering.

There is not much actual legitimate usage. It is pretty bad for privacy as the
whole idea is that the entire transaction history is public and permanent.

~~~
rosywoozlechan
I believe I've read about people in developing countries with high inflation
in their government's currency rely on bitcoin but I don't know how true that
is. I've never bought anything with bitcoin and I hope I never have to.

~~~
colechristensen
Which in most cases wouldn't be legal locally, which fits under money
laundering. Morality might be a little more indeterminate depending on the
situation.

~~~
AgentME
It's only money laundering if you're using cryptocurrency to get out of paying
taxes or to hide criminal activity. It's not money laundering to buy something
instead of keeping your money in a currency undergoing inflation.

~~~
colechristensen
Money laundering is attempting to hide the source or destination of funds.
Hyperinflation states will usually have strict currency controls in place and
Bitcoin is useful in that situation to get around those controls, the whole
idea being... its usefulness in hiding the flow of funds.

------
Mojah
For anyone interested in the code behind the halving, I had some fun
dissecting the GetBlockSubsidy() function that takes care of halving & ending
of block subsidy [1].

It continues to amaze me that I struggle to set up a 5-node database cluster
without one going out-of-sync or split-braining every few weeks, yet the
bitcoin network manages to keep thousands of miners in-sync. This has to be
the best example of eventual consistency in a production network.

[1] [https://ma.ttias.be/dissecting-code-bitcoin-
halving/](https://ma.ttias.be/dissecting-code-bitcoin-halving/)

~~~
enether
This is why Blockchain is such an elegant solution to distributed consensus.

I prefer calling it a distributed mechanism for _emergent consensus_.
Consensus is not achieved explicitly - there is no election or fixed moment
when consensus occurs. Instead, consensus is an emergent product of the
asynchronous interaction of thousands of independent nodes, all following
protocol rules.

------
tromp
One of Bitcoin's main goals is to fix the unpredictable and arbitrary emission
in fiat currencies. But its finite supply, said to be modeled after Gold's, is
questionable.

Gold may have a finite supply, but it's been mined for millenia and has slowly
increased its supply rate over time, and will likely continue to do so in our
lifetime.

In contrast, Bitcoin's emission which ranges from 2009 through 2140 is heavily
tilted to the first few years.

Its final century from 2040 through 2140 accounts for only about 0.5% of
emission.

The only point of the halvings is to be able to claim "finite supply". A
constant reward would still have the yearly supply inflation rate (stock to
flow ratio) going to 0, albeit more slowly. So crucially, supply would still
be scarce, would be more predictable (time independent), more fair to late
adopters, and be much closer to Gold's emission over our lifetime.

It would also avoid the inherent instability [1] of mining rewards dominated
by transaction fees, and avoid lengthening confirmation times to maintain
security against doublespending [2].

If we further consider the fact that coins inevitably get lost, then even a
constant reward will yield a softcap of supply, where yearly emission merely
serves to balance the yearly losses.

Unfortunately, practically all cryptocurrencies subscribe to the notion that
early miners must receive greater rewards, even when they often already enjoy
lower difficulty.

[1]
[https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf)

[2] [https://www.coindesk.com/the-halving-exposes-bitcoin-
to-51-a...](https://www.coindesk.com/the-halving-exposes-bitcoin-
to-51-attacks-heres-what-we-can-do)

~~~
lisper
> The only point of the halvings is to be able to claim "finite supply"

The irony is that no matter what you do there will only ever be a finite
supply of any currency, fiat or otherwise. It's a finite universe, so "finite
supply" is inherently imposed by the laws of physics.

> practically all cryptocurrencies subscribe to the notion that early miners
> must receive greater rewards

That's the real objective. Like all startups, cryptocurrencies want to
encourage early adoption by, among other things, FOMO. If there is no benefit
to being an early adopter, no one will adopt early, and if no one adopts
early, you will never get to critical mass.

~~~
rwmj
Why can't I just declare that I issue "TREE(3)" of my own fiat currency?
There's finite supply only in some astronomical sense that computers would
have difficulty storing bank balances represented in BCD or something.

~~~
wnoise
Because TREE(3) units are not well divisible. You can't give someone one and
have the leftover amount representable with any reasonable amount of memory.

------
digitailor
A critical relevant fact is missing to help explain this. It screws up
currency analogies, and that may be why people have asked for clarification.

Bitcoin (BTC) is classed by the US Federal Gov't (IRS) as _property_ , not
currency.

That wasn't some kind of mistake or tax technicality on the IRS' part - a lot
of analysis went into this in 2013, along with DHS and FinCEN. This is _the_
definition for BTC in the US.

That means what happened today could be described as: The first and oldest
decentralized, distributed, cryptographically-secured record of digital
property ownership (Bitcoin as a network) is producing cryptographic keys (the
property, BTC) at half the rate it was yesterday. There is now less of the
digital property (BTC) being created by the network daily, and this is due to
an artificial scarcity strategy built into the Bitcoin source.

Hope that helps

~~~
strgcmc
Another way to analogize: imagine the westward expansion of the USA also being
subject to "halvenings" like this. In years 0-9, settlers were
encouraged/allowed to settle on 1000 miles worth of land (counting linearly
westward), then years 10-19 only 500 miles further, than yes 20-29 only 250
miles further, etc.

Early settlers are incentivized to grab large swathes of land quickly and
cheaply, to get the system bootstrapped. Later settlers have to fight over
smaller tracts of land, because after all the land is finite (you eventually
reach the ocean). However, the land is also nicely divisible into smaller and
smaller sub-plots, so units can be adjusted as needed.

The rules by which this "westward expansion" are governed are written into the
Bitcoin protocol. But unlike land and the ocean which are natural facts for
the most part that we take for granted a priori, with Bitcoin the
"border"/limit here is also defined as a theoretical construct (and hence,
could theoretically be changed, but this would be a hard fork and people would
have to reevaluate the value of a new network with a new set of
boundaries/rules).

------
empath75
So, pre halvening -- the average block reward was worth about $100,000. Fees
totaled about $5,000.

I don't really understand the economics of this, but it seems there are a few
possible outcomes:

A) Prices double because miners refuse to sell at a price that gives them less
than $100k a block and demand for coins is inelastic.

B) Fees go up 10x because miners now need to make $50k in transaction fees
instead of $5k per block to make up for the lower block reward, and demand for
transactions in inelastic.

C) Difficulty and prices drop because neither transaction demand nor coin
demand is inelastic, and miners will begin turning off rigs that are no longer
profitable at $50k per block.

D) Some combination of the above.

~~~
kinghajj
E) Most miners accept less profits than they had previously earned. Those that
can no longer profitably mine shut down, causing a small dip in hash rate.

~~~
duskwuff
I wouldn't count on it being "small". Miners have always operated on the edge
of profitability, and there's been a lot of consolidation in the
cryptocurrency mining space over the past few years. It's entirely possible
that this halving will force some major operators out of the market.

------
fierarul
BitCoin is such a big disappointment. From a global way of making
micropayments it became a global multi level marketing pump and dump scheme.
The true believers always told how BitCoin will be the one true saviour when
shit hits the fan -- well, we are during a pandemic not seen in 100 years and
BitCoin is basically irrelevant.

There is no BitCoin economy, only people watching the BTCUSD sticker price
because only the _real_ economy matters.

I'm also willing to bet the network resilience is not as high as techno folks
want to believe and if some governments want it shutdown it will be pretty
close to shut down and the FX rate will go towards $0.

In many ways BitCoin is not an anti-globalist or anti-anything response. It is
a product that exists due to globalization. And the high prices are a result
of some economic stability and prosperity that allowed the population to play
with shiny things. The coming depression will put an end to such trivialities.

------
ur-whale
For complete Bitcoin newbies, it is perhaps worth noting that while
newsworthy, this event is not like an earthquake or a stock market crash as it
does not come as a surprise to anyone:

This event was (modulo + or - a month) pre-determined from the very first day
bitcoin was launched (and so is the next halvening and the one after that).

------
aazaa
The page lists "Coinbase Transaction" in the quantity 7.15968084 BTC.

The coinbase transaction is the first one listed in the block. It has no
explicit payer, and can be valued up to/including the sum of:

\- the block's aggregate transaction fees

\- the block subsidy (6.25 BTC starting with block 630,000 today)

There's some technically detailed information on coinbase transaction/money
stock edge cases that have occurred over the years here:

[https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/38998](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/38998)

Also see this discussion of a jaw-dropping miscalculation of the block subsidy
(even though dated April 1, it's for real):

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawiki)

------
hudon
Why have a “halving” every four years, you may ask?

Having a periodic “The Halvening” ritual every four years allows Bitcoiners to
reconcile and forgive each other’s trespasses for one, it also gives Bitcoin a
nice bump of attention in the media and on social media, and finally it gives
the Bitcoin High Priests an opportunity during the ritual to re-iterate the
Bitcoin Commandments (eg. “Thou shall worship fixed monetary supply” and “thou
shall not worship other consensus rules”). All this strengthens the community,
and thus, the consensus, and a strong consensus is part of the main selling
point: to get filthy rich.

~~~
shobith
I don't like Bananas. Instead of just not buying them at the grocery store and
not eating them, I'll post a negative comment whenever someone mentions
Bananas.

Bananas are bad for you! Bananas suck! Bananas are a scam!

~~~
hudon
I’m providing a sociological hypothesis for something that people usually only
provide technical explanations for. If you have a novel explanation for why
Bananas are purchased that is unrelated to nutrition, it is worth sharing at
least.

------
jovial_cavalier
I don't understand why this is causing almost any movement in the markets at
all. It's a predictable event, so everyone's position should already take it
into account. Why would this introduce any volatility?

~~~
sparkie
There are some things which aren't predictable, such as how many miners are
going to drop out of the race given their potential revenue has just been
chopped in half, with no corresponding doubling of the BTC/USD exchange rate.

Some may be speculating that miners dropping out is bad for bitcoin because it
reduces the security of the network and may give people weak hands if they're
concerned that their money may not be as safe as previously assumed. Miners
dropping out of the race would also release more mining hardware onto the
markets at discounted prices, and some of it may go towards attempting to
attack bitcoin. However, if you do the sums and work out how much it would
cost to attempt and sustain such an attack, and how much can be gained from
it, you quickly realize that such an attack would never be attempted for
monetary gain - it is in the miner's best interest to play by the rules. The
only other motive for attack is to cause temporary denial-of-service, at the
expense of the miner, but this could only plausibly be conducted by a nation
state due to the amount of work done in Bitcoin.

------
chrisshroba
Will this likely increase typical transaction fees to make up for block
reward?

~~~
ajkdhcb2
In the long term yes the halving schedule must lead to huge fees (eventually
there will be zero inflation). As inflation decreases, miners have to be paid
by fees to secure the network. Otherwise the security collapses.

~~~
gridlockd
The fees are paid by the users of the network, if the demand on network
transactions is low, there will be little reward for mining.

This means that without sufficient demand for transactions, a majority of
miners would have to abandon the network, which would indeed put network
security at risk.

Therefore I predict that the miners will make the supply of Bitcoin unlimited,
should that situation occur. They already got their way with keeping the
Bitcoin block size fixed, which kept transaction fees high.

------
decompiled_dev
"Bitcoin is an experimental digital currency that enables instant payments to
anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate
with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried
out collectively by the network."

Seems like an successful experiment to me. I am excited to see what next gen
tech in this space will bring.

------
jameslevy
Is there speculation regarding what miners will do instead of mining Bitcoin?
For example, mining another cryptocurrency instead of Bitcoin? This would seem
to have implications for the mining power for these altcoins, and perhaps
implications for their prices as a result. I haven't seen any discussion about
this.

~~~
vmception
It balances itself out. a portion of the miners leave making it proportionally
more profitable for the remaining miners, or they upgrade to more efficient
hardware reducing their power costs to mine the same amount of bitcoin, or the
price doubles, or a combination of all of the above.

during some periods of time the price falls and it takes longer for all of
that to happen, with existing miners being slowly replaced by more well
capitalized miners

~~~
jameslevy
Sure, but presumably the miners leaving will still want to do something
profitable with their mining equipment. I'd expect to see the hashrate
increase for other PoW coins. Unless there's some reason for that not to
happen.

~~~
vmception
There is a market for coins with the same hashing algorithm, specifically to
attract miners that can't do anything on the bitcoin blockchain.

They are all useless and don't have exchange rates to justify the electricity
cost. You can launch a new one given the assumption that this is many miner's
first halving.

The price to yield to electrical cost market is pretty efficient, rarely a
long lasting advantage there.

------
Animats
So what happened? Did the price go up or down?

Bitcoin fans claims the price should go up. Conventional financial wisdom is
that the price of something contains expected future events, so the price
should remain the same.

------
runeks
Regarding a potential impact on the bitcoin price, consider that — assuming
miners sell their mined bitcoins for dollars to pay for hardware and
electricity — now only 6.25 BTC per 10 minutes will be sold into the market
because of the halving. That’s a reduction in the amount of bitcoin sold into
the market every 24 hours of roughly $8m.

I believe this is the theory behind expecting a price increase. Whether or not
it materializes time will tell.

------
X6S1x6Okd1st
Anyone have any news on if any major miners have said if they are going to be
switching away from BTC for the time being?

As of 10 blocks past halving it doesn't look like total hash power has
decreased much.

It'll certainly be interesting to see if mining power drops off in the coming
month.

Long term I'd love to follow something that simply warns when there's enough
rentable or assumed dark mining power that 51% attacks on bitcoin mainchain is
a realistic threat.

------
bouncycastle
Looks like it's a non-event.

Ethereum launching their "ETH 2.0" and transitioning to staking will be a
bigger event in the crypto space later this summer!

~~~
kristianp
Ethereum POS has been coming soon for a long time. It would be good to see it
happen.

------
Asuchug4
Oh great, another site that servers machine translation of content. So I get
"brownie" instead of "hash", that makes page so easier to understand. The only
worse offender is the Google Play store, the autotranslated description
actively prevents me from understanding app description.

------
leorio
for all the sceptics here, a good intro to bitcoin and money[1]

[https://medium.com/@vijayboyapati/the-bullish-case-for-
bitco...](https://medium.com/@vijayboyapati/the-bullish-case-for-
bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1)

~~~
kiliantics
Except that it is now pretty well established that money was not preceded by
barter, this was just a poorly conceived hypothesis of Adam Smith's which has
no evidence to support it but which happened to catch on with economists

------
535188B17C93743
The crusade will continue on. Many folks whom have bought into BTC at this
point know very little about its technology. Not sure if that's a good or a
bad thing...

~~~
k00b
It's a good thing only if it indicates the UX is getting better.

------
hinkley
What's the advantage of reducing it by 50% each year versus 30% every 6 months
(51% a year)? Seems like the stepping function would be less severe.

~~~
tim333
It's not that, it's every 210,000 blocks (approximately every four years).

I guess Satoshi thought that would be a good schedule when the code was
written. It must have been hard to see how the future would pan out.

------
mudlus
Bitcoin now has a lower inflation rate than gold. It is likely that the main
seller of Bitcoin from here on out will no longer be miners but exchanges.

------
llamataboot
TLDR: mining rewards should pretty much have no effect on BTC price

We're years into bitcoin and I feel that people still don't understand the
basic premise that with an adjusting difficulty it literally doesn't matter
how many people want to mine. Difficulty will adjust to about the break even
point for miners that can run at scale (likely in a place with cheap
electricity).

The price of bitcoin is still based on supply and demand for bitcoin. Whatever
THAT clearing price is will determine whether or not it is profitable to mine.
If it is not profitable to mine, miners will drop out until the difficulty
level falls enough that it becomes profitable again.

~~~
konschubert
Importantly, with the reward being cut in half, difficulty should go down.

~~~
qorrect
Competition or difficulty ?

------
liquidify
Miners will now receive 6.25 bitcoins per block.

------
StLCylone
Where would the climate crisis be if we diverted all the energy spent on
Bitcoin mining into carbon sequestration?

------
TheRealPomax
I have no idea what that means, and the page itself is a ledger, not anything
to explain what that means.

------
nikivi
Would it mean there would be less interest in mining bitcoin (and thus
'wasting' electricity)?

~~~
new2628
No need for quotes, it is an absolute waste of energy and effort on a
planetary scale with no benefit whatsoever.

~~~
banachtarski
It's an "extreme statement" but to be honest, I'm inclined to agree. As a
currency, it's an absolute failure. Far too volatile, illiquid, and
unregulated to be even remotely usable/reliable. As for everything else? It's
still looking for a "solution" that isn't just something hype driven.

~~~
535188B17C93743
Unfortunately, its technology (or maybe the combo of its popularity and
technology) never really allowed for it to become anything but a speculative
asset.

------
ChrisArchitect
the fact that I can't see a straight answer to the general question about
'what does this mean simply' or attempt at some clarity that isn't followed by
some argument or pitch or slag off of something response is ridiculous and
sums up the world of bitcoin

------
banku_brougham
What is the current rate of growth of bitcoin purchase transactions,
preferable time series history?

------
ur-whale
Interesting to see what will happen to Bitcoin which slashed the supply in
half exactly at a time when major currencies have fully open the supply
floodgates because of Covid-19.

If the law of supply of demand carries any predictive power, BTC should see a
compounded rise.

~~~
nas
It will be interesting. The amount of fiat money being created right now is a
bit crazy. Whether that is "good for Bitcoin" is not entirely clear. Bitcoin
has failed to live up to initial hopes. Transaction fees are too high and
throughput (transactions per second) is too low. In a way, it is victim of its
own success, at least in terms of price per coin. The second layer protocols,
like Lighting, were supposed to solve the fee and throughput problems. I've
played with Lighting and when it works, it is amazing. However, it far from a
simple and polished user experience. Maybe they will eventually get there. Or,
maybe people will give up waiting.

------
ilyas121
Btc breaks 35k by next halving (not maintains). Documenting this here so I
remember to check back when I see the next halving up on HN board in 2024.

Edit: Feel free to reply with your guesses (good as mine) for a good laugh in
4 years

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ivanstegic
Could someone explain, in English, why this is a big deal?

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saltking112
Can someone explain to the uninitiated what halving is?

~~~
rantwasp
read:
[https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook](https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook)

in a nutshell: miners group transactions into block (ie mine). whoever manages
to form a block (you need to solve a computationally expensive problem that
has the transactions you want to include as inputs) get a reward. up until
today the reward was 12.5 bitcoins. Starting today it's half of that 6.25.

speculations about what this means and where BTC is going follow from this.

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corpMaverick
ELI5 ?

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lalaland1125
There is a quite a bit of incorrect economic analysis in this thread and
elsewhere. In a rational market the halving should have no impact on the price
of Bitcoin because it's a well known event that should have already been
priced in.

It's totally possible that the price might go up, but the reason for that rise
would be the irrational behavior of other market participants and people
should acknowledge that.

~~~
sillysaurusx
_rational market_

Perhaps this is glib, but it's worth remembering that bitcoin isn't a rational
market. At no point in its history has the market reacted rationally to any
event.

It only appears rational in hindsight, if at all. But "rational" implies a
causal link between an explanation and a subsequent event. Those explanations
almost never turn out to be true.

~~~
economicslol
Is the actual market really any better? Seems a strange position to take.

~~~
enumjorge
But the top-level comment isn't a comparison between the bitcoin and regular
markets. It made a statement of the form 'assuming X, Y must be true'. The
parent comment pointed out assumption X is not valid, so we can't conclude Y
is true.

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iamharishsingh
Is is safe to invest in bitcoin now?

~~~
haakon
It's never safe to invest in Bitcoin.

~~~
waiseristy
It probably more accurate to say that one gambles in Bitcoin

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masteranza
Predicted by Luboš: [https://motls.blogspot.com/2020/05/may-11th-12th-could-
be-gr...](https://motls.blogspot.com/2020/05/may-11th-12th-could-be-great-
days-to.html)

~~~
jameslevy
Everyone thinking this seems to have resulted in it happening a couple days
early. It's not yet clear whether today or tomorrow is a good time to short
BTC.

