For those like me who didn't understand the relevance, back in 2009, Satoshi (the creator of Bitcoin) put the following message in the very first block:
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Back then it was a response to the 2008/9 financial crisis, which is what makes this new message relevant.
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.
I hope they picked the title of the article in the physical NYT paper release, and not the nytimes website, since the website is known to change the title.
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.
To believe this is true, you must also believe that efficient markets do not really exist.
Imagine if a publicly traded company announced that in 1 years time, they would buy back half of their outstanding shares (not a great analogy but its the best I can think of). What would happen to the stock price?
All securities prices in publicly traded markets are essentially priced as discounted cash flows over the next 20-30 years. The current price reflects all available public information about those cash flows.
I'm not saying efficient markets is 100% true all of the time, of course the world demonstrates that it isn't, but the level of disbelief you have to have in the hypothesis to believe that a well-known public event affecting Bitcoin will result in a 3x price increase is lunacy, IMO.
I don't agree that this is the reason that people are in a "tizzy". To me this instance is an instance where a shock enters the system.
Think of it like a differential equation where a steady state is changed... like a spring that has been held in a certain position is released. There will be a shock as the system seeks to find a new equilibrium.
The fact that the system has been shocked means that there is some predictable craziness that will happen soon. It is basically guaranteed fun no matter how it turns out.
I've been following bitcoin a long time, and was excited for the halving. But I'd never heard of the model you described and could care less about it.
Given the ultra-speculative and very volatile nature of bitcoin so far, aren't these models effectively numerology? I really fail to see how you can reasonably tie bitcoin's rate of production with its price.
After all the last halving was in July 9 2016. Since then the production has been reasonably constant while the price has been a complete rollercoaster.
With logarithmic scales and big enough error bars you can fit anything into anything.
>If you're wondering why your friends who are into cryptocurrency are in a tizzy
Being into cryptocurrency is reason enough to be honest.
> Roughly it predicts [2] that the price will settle into a band around 30,000 USD sometime next year.
No, it predicts it will be at $30k at the end of this year, and $100k this time next year [0]. I'm pretty comfortable saying that no, it wont. If I though there was a reasonable, legitimate way to trade against that outcome occuring, I absolutely would. For reference, in the past year, BTC has increased in price by ~$1450 or 20% - getting to $100k would be over 1000% increase.
Another key factor which these models often ignore is the rate of "Tether" printing, which is often used to buy bitcoin and is not subject to limits.
My own prediction is to observe that the price has been in a wide band around $10k for the past year, so will continue to hover around that, with gradual upslopes and sudden dropoffs of 5-30% for no apparent reason that cannot easily be post-hoc linked to events.
> If you're wondering why your friends who are into cryptocurrency are in a tizzy
I'm not wondering that, because none of my friends are in a tizzy. Are your friends in a tizzy? Am I just outside the social connections to the tizzy club?
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.
This is an ignorant question, but maybe someone can finally explain this to me...
"So-called bitcoin miners expend tremendous amounts of computing power to verify transactions and link them"
If this is true, shouldn't the ability to mine be limited by the computational resources needed to perform these tasks? Instead, it seems people increase computing power with no apparent limit in order to mine, and the "demand" for that power is never met.
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?
I've held for several years now (~7 or so). My logic is this:
1. This is all 100% speculative at the moment. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a charlatan. You may make someone money if you're patient, but the point is acquiring a decent stake while it's still affordable on the off (IMO, not 0%) chance that Bitcoin or one of its derivatives become a secondary and then primary spending currency. Realistically, I see a boondoggled attempt by governments to create their own digital currencies with Bitcoin being used primarily as a store of value, a la gold.
2. Technologically, Bitcoin is an intelligent solution to the financial problems created by government mismanagement and greed. It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn creative. With time, most of the major issues seem to be fixable.
3. Also technologically, Bitcoin is not ready for the prime time. The lightning network being implemented at a large scale would be the first warning shot that Bitcoin could see massive, stable use. Until you match transaction volume of Visa, Amex, etc., it's not going to take.
4. The likely timeline this plays out will be loosely correlated with the government's intervention negatively impacting the purchasing power of the dollar (speaking relative to the U.S.). The current situation is actually surprising; I didn't expect anything like this to happen for at least another 2-3 years.
5. Due to the way that humans tend to overestimate change in the short-term, the likely timeline for this to all play out is throughout the 2020's and early 30's, with the mid-to-late 2030's being the "even grandma pays with Bitcoin" moment. I'd say right now is the 97'-98' era for Bitcoin if we're using the internet as a parallel.
6. The current marketing and messaging of Bitcoin is, to be blunt, a freakshow. Painful as it may be, normal folks don't want to be associated with things that seem grimy, shifty, or subversive. The only way to overcome this is to demonstrate that using Bitcoin is easier than the current payment options, or, not having it would mean seeing all of your financial assets rapidly devalue downward toward 0 (which means the U.S. is collapsing and is a whole other bag of chips).
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.
I use USD-C and DAI to give out grants to a team of international volunteers. Could not get payments to a guy in Turkey through venmo, paypal, square cash, or transferwise. Now we just send everything via stablecoins.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's pretty genius system if you think about it. Each of these halving events will shuffle the market players because different actors can be motivated by different incentives. If difficulty drops, then it might be an incentive for smaller players to enter mining again.
It's a chaotic system by design which makes it really hard to predict what will happen in the long run.
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.
Price dropped 50% recently and then tripled. There is no difference to miners between a 50% price drop and a halving. At least the halving is predictable but 50% discounts are not. People who are in this business are ready for volatility.
you should consider what the price to mine is vs the reward. as long as the reward > price to mine, the miners will keep mining. once it drops, you will either have miners dropping off the networks or the difficulty decreasing until another equilibrium is reached. once you have less miners it's possible that the TX fees will increase if you want your transactions mined (the miners cannot really impose a transaction fee. it's the transactions with the highest fees that get mined into a block and incorporated into the block chain)
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.
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).
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.
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!
>Having a periodic "The Halvening" ritual every four years allows Bitcoiners to reconcile an dforgive each other's tresspasses
You're going to have to elaborate on this. I don't understand how the adjustment of future mining rewards has anything to do with past "trespasses."
>it also gives Bitcoin a nice bump of attention in the media
It gives bitcoin negative media attention, because people on the outside will read the headline as "Bitcoin's value is cut in half," which is not the case.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] k00b|5 years ago|reply
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/629999
[+] [-] ehsankia|5 years ago|reply
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Back then it was a response to the 2008/9 financial crisis, which is what makes this new message relevant.
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
[+] [-] arcticbull|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2bitencryption|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinghajj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewla|5 years ago|reply
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
[2] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-halving-will-be-make-...
[+] [-] nateberkopec|5 years ago|reply
Imagine if a publicly traded company announced that in 1 years time, they would buy back half of their outstanding shares (not a great analogy but its the best I can think of). What would happen to the stock price?
All securities prices in publicly traded markets are essentially priced as discounted cash flows over the next 20-30 years. The current price reflects all available public information about those cash flows.
I'm not saying efficient markets is 100% true all of the time, of course the world demonstrates that it isn't, but the level of disbelief you have to have in the hypothesis to believe that a well-known public event affecting Bitcoin will result in a 3x price increase is lunacy, IMO.
[+] [-] liquidify|5 years ago|reply
Think of it like a differential equation where a steady state is changed... like a spring that has been held in a certain position is released. There will be a shock as the system seeks to find a new equilibrium.
The fact that the system has been shocked means that there is some predictable craziness that will happen soon. It is basically guaranteed fun no matter how it turns out.
I've been following bitcoin a long time, and was excited for the halving. But I'd never heard of the model you described and could care less about it.
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
After all the last halving was in July 9 2016. Since then the production has been reasonably constant while the price has been a complete rollercoaster.
With logarithmic scales and big enough error bars you can fit anything into anything.
>If you're wondering why your friends who are into cryptocurrency are in a tizzy
Being into cryptocurrency is reason enough to be honest.
[+] [-] petercooper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ac29|5 years ago|reply
No, it predicts it will be at $30k at the end of this year, and $100k this time next year [0]. I'm pretty comfortable saying that no, it wont. If I though there was a reasonable, legitimate way to trade against that outcome occuring, I absolutely would. For reference, in the past year, BTC has increased in price by ~$1450 or 20% - getting to $100k would be over 1000% increase.
[0] https://digitalik.net/btc/
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
My own prediction is to observe that the price has been in a wide band around $10k for the past year, so will continue to hover around that, with gradual upslopes and sudden dropoffs of 5-30% for no apparent reason that cannot easily be post-hoc linked to events.
[+] [-] ColanR|5 years ago|reply
You have my curiosity. What is the prediction that Stock-To-Flow made about the effect of the halving?
[+] [-] Alex3917|5 years ago|reply
2) I'm forced to cut my security budget in half.
3) ??????
4) I'm now twice as secure.
[+] [-] Traster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freepor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jMyles|5 years ago|reply
I'm not wondering that, because none of my friends are in a tizzy. Are your friends in a tizzy? Am I just outside the social connections to the tizzy club?
[+] [-] amiga_500|5 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=64R918K-3L8
With the extreme uncertainty globally, this model cannot be reliable.
[+] [-] artursapek|5 years ago|reply
https://share.cryptowat.ch/charts/bqsr58eein8u9uevh370-krake...
https://twitter.com/cryptowat_ch/status/1253335480256483330
[+] [-] trynewideas|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] standardUser|5 years ago|reply
"So-called bitcoin miners expend tremendous amounts of computing power to verify transactions and link them"
If this is true, shouldn't the ability to mine be limited by the computational resources needed to perform these tasks? Instead, it seems people increase computing power with no apparent limit in order to mine, and the "demand" for that power is never met.
[+] [-] gowld|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottmsul|5 years ago|reply
2012 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842947
2016 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061618
[+] [-] mrunkel|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] rglover|5 years ago|reply
1. This is all 100% speculative at the moment. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a charlatan. You may make someone money if you're patient, but the point is acquiring a decent stake while it's still affordable on the off (IMO, not 0%) chance that Bitcoin or one of its derivatives become a secondary and then primary spending currency. Realistically, I see a boondoggled attempt by governments to create their own digital currencies with Bitcoin being used primarily as a store of value, a la gold.
2. Technologically, Bitcoin is an intelligent solution to the financial problems created by government mismanagement and greed. It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn creative. With time, most of the major issues seem to be fixable.
3. Also technologically, Bitcoin is not ready for the prime time. The lightning network being implemented at a large scale would be the first warning shot that Bitcoin could see massive, stable use. Until you match transaction volume of Visa, Amex, etc., it's not going to take.
4. The likely timeline this plays out will be loosely correlated with the government's intervention negatively impacting the purchasing power of the dollar (speaking relative to the U.S.). The current situation is actually surprising; I didn't expect anything like this to happen for at least another 2-3 years.
5. Due to the way that humans tend to overestimate change in the short-term, the likely timeline for this to all play out is throughout the 2020's and early 30's, with the mid-to-late 2030's being the "even grandma pays with Bitcoin" moment. I'd say right now is the 97'-98' era for Bitcoin if we're using the internet as a parallel.
6. The current marketing and messaging of Bitcoin is, to be blunt, a freakshow. Painful as it may be, normal folks don't want to be associated with things that seem grimy, shifty, or subversive. The only way to overcome this is to demonstrate that using Bitcoin is easier than the current payment options, or, not having it would mean seeing all of your financial assets rapidly devalue downward toward 0 (which means the U.S. is collapsing and is a whole other bag of chips).
[+] [-] colechristensen|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brendanw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mojah|5 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] tromp|5 years ago|reply
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...
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/the-halving-exposes-bitcoin-to-51-a...
[+] [-] digitailor|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] empath75|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tiborsaas|5 years ago|reply
It's a chaotic system by design which makes it really hard to predict what will happen in the long run.
[+] [-] kinghajj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rantwasp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fierarul|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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
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...
[+] [-] hudon|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
Bananas are bad for you! Bananas suck! Bananas are a scam!
[+] [-] jovial_cavalier|5 years ago|reply
You're going to have to elaborate on this. I don't understand how the adjustment of future mining rewards has anything to do with past "trespasses."
>it also gives Bitcoin a nice bump of attention in the media
It gives bitcoin negative media attention, because people on the outside will read the headline as "Bitcoin's value is cut in half," which is not the case.
[+] [-] jovial_cavalier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisshroba|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decompiled_dev|5 years ago|reply
Seems like an successful experiment to me. I am excited to see what next gen tech in this space will bring.
[+] [-] jameslevy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
I believe this is the theory behind expecting a price increase. Whether or not it materializes time will tell.
[+] [-] X6S1x6Okd1st|5 years ago|reply
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.