Bitcoin's "halving" is expected to happen soon. But its potential impact depends on your relationship to the coin; it's likely to affect miners and investors differently.

"To the people who own bitcoin because they think it's a good store of value, this halving is not that big of a deal. But to the miners, it's a huge deal," Omid Malekan, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and author of "Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms," tells CNBC Make It.
Miners receive bitcoins, known as block rewards, for verifying and validating transactions and helping keep the blockchain network secure. The miners who receive them can then hold, trade or sell them. This is also how new digital coins enter into circulation.

Since there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin, the halving is a technical event written into bitcoin's code that splits the block reward miners receive in half every four years. In 2009, miners were rewarded 50 bitcoin. In 2012, they were rewarded 25 bitcoin, in 2016, they received 12.5, and in 2020, they received 6.25.