Cryptocurrency Bitcoin Halving Again

By RTTNews Staff Writer | Published: 5/11/2020 12:04 PM ET

The world's most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) is set to halve again for a third time. This means the reward given to Bitcoin miners for processing transactions is being cut by 50 percent. This also means that the rate at which new Bitcoins enter circulations are halved.

Bitcoin has generally ended with higher prices after the completion of halving, as it happened during the halving in November 2012 and July 2016. It all began in 2007, when the total number of new Bitcoin mined by miners per block was at 50 or 50 Bitcoins entering circulation every 10 minutes, which is the normally quoted Bitcoin block time.

The halving was necessitated nearly every four years as Bitcoin's anonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto decided that only 21 million BTC would ever exist. The total number of Bitcoin mined by miners per block was reduced to 25 BTC in 2012 and it was further halved to 12.5 BTC in 2016. It is now being slashed to 6.25 BTC.

New Bitcoin mined by miners per block is also called block reward, which is an important aspect of Bitcoin mining. This is the economic reward for the mining activity, which involves high power mining systems and usage of an enormous amount of electricity.

In anticipation of today's Bitcoin halving event, BTC has been volatile for the past few days with the price of BTC touching $10,000 last week and crashing more than $2,000 in the past two days to hit a price of $8,100. BTC is currently trading at 8941.29, up 3.02 percent in the past 24 hours.

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Article written by an RTT News Staff Writer, and posted on the RTT News.com website.

Article reposted on Markethive by Jeffrey Sloe