This article discusses the upcoming halving of Bitcoin, which occurs every four years. It provides an estimate that the fourth halving will happen in less than 10 months based on the remaining number of blocks to be mined. Stay tuned to discover the exact date of Bitcoin’s next halving.
About every four years, the value of bitcoin is halved; the following one will occur in 2024. To be specific, a halving will occur every 210,000 blocks according to the Bitcoin protocol. A new block is typically mined in around 10 minutes, which translates to 144 blocks every day or more than 4,300 each month.
There are still 40,000 blocks to mine until we reach the next one since we are currently slightly under 800,000 blocks deep. We should cross the crucial 840,000 block threshold, which will start the fourth halving, in less than 10 months. When will Bitcoin’s next halving occur?
In actuality, the gap between each block is not always 10 minutes.
The process of mining a block is randomly looking for the hash, an alphanumeric string that serves as the block’s validation.
However, it is possible to find it in such a way that, on average, it takes approximately 10 minutes. As a result, the so-called block time consistently stays within a 10-minute range.
For instance, it was typically slightly above this level in June but almost usually somewhat below it in May.
On the other side, the block time was usually always less than 10 minutes at the beginning of 2023, which slightly shortened the estimate of the following half-yearly date.
As a result, even if you are certain that the next halving will occur exactly at block number 840,000, forecasting the date of the event is not precise.
Additionally, it depends on how you compute it, i.e., whether you use the 10 minute theoretical average block time, the current average block time, or the average block times from the previous several months or years.
But according to almost all projections, the fourth halving will begin after block number 840,000 is mined, maybe in late April or early May of next year.
Bitcoin: Previous price halving; another one anticipated in 2024
Only Satoshi Nakamoto and a small group of other early users mined Bitcoin at first in 2009, and they did so very swiftly.
Despite the fact that the first block was actually mined on 3 January 2009, block number 210,000, which started the first halving, wasn’t mined until 28 November 2012, or 1,425 days later—roughly 3 years, 11 months—after the first block.
Even less time passed between blocks in the second cycle, with block number 420,000 being mined exactly 1,319 days, or slightly over three years and seven months, later, on July 9, 2016.
Since the overall average block duration was less than 10 minutes even during the third cycle, block number 630,000 was mined on May 11, 2020, exactly 1,402 days later (just under three years and ten months) than the previous block.
Thus, block number 840,000 will almost surely be mined before May 11th, 2024, even though it is theoretically feasible that it will take less time even this time than the theoretical 1,458 days.
By coincidence, the price of BTC was about $12 on the day of the initial halving, whereas by July 9, 2016, it had already climbed to $663.
Although it was still recovering from the financial markets’ collapse brought on by the commencement of the epidemic two months earlier, it was approximately $9,000 in May 2020.
The effect on the cost
The price of Bitcoin is unaffected by the halving itself.
It does, however, lessen the selling pressure from miners, which lessens selling pressure generally.
When there were more mined BTCs in the past, this effect was more pronounced; however, as the number of mined BTCs declines, this effect gets less and less pronounced.
No meaningful bull run, however, has ever begun in the days immediately following a halving since the decreased selling pressure is insufficient to drive the price higher.
But thus far, each of the three halving occasions (in 2013, 2017, and 2021) has been followed by a full-fledged speculative bubble that expanded the following year.
This boom has always imploded the following year, although in no instance has the price of Bitcoin dropped below the value of the previous halving after the bubble exploded.
At $172, which is more than 100 times greater than the $12 of the initial halving, the 2014 bear market low was reached in January 2015.
The low point in 2018 was roughly $3,200, or about five times the price in July 2016, while the low point in 2022 was $15,500, or just under double the price in May 2020.
How do you halve?
Literally, half signifies halving.
The miner receives a reward of halves.
In fact, the first 50 BTC were created out of nothing for everyone who succeeded in mining a block.
In other words, out of a total of 21 million bitcoins, the first 210,000 blocks produced around 10 million.
This reward’s first halving cut it in half to 25 BTC. A further 5.2 million bitcoins were created in block number 420,000, raising the total to almost 15 million.
By May 2020, when block number 630,000 was mined and the reward was decreased by the second halving to 12.5 BTC, more over 18 million bitcoins had been produced.
The fourth halving will cut the payout to 3.125 BTC from 6.25 BTC following the third halving. The tragic total of 21 million bitcoins will be reached by the year 2140, according to the current creation pace of 19.4 million.
These numbers make it clear why the halving will lessen selling pressure on the miners, not the least of which being that they must purchase electricity to carry out their operation, which must be paid for in fiat currency.
As a result, they are effectively forced to sell a sizable amount of the BTCs they amass, however as these gradually decrease over time, they end up selling less and less.
