If you’ve been in the crypto space for any length of time, you’ve no doubt heard of the famous Bitcoin “halving”. There’s a halving coming up in mid-2024, so the topic is in the news again, and there’s a good chance you have lingering questions about what it all means.
In order to best serve the Core community, and to help everyone understand the role that Core will come to play in the broader ecosystem, this piece will explore the mechanics behind the Bitcoin halving. It’ll also touch on the way in which Core’s unique Satoshi Plus consensus mechanism will work to make Bitcoin miners profitable long into the future.
What is the Bitcoin Halving?
As you’re no doubt aware, the Bitcoin network is secured by its miners, who compete with one another to be the first to mine a new block by solving a particular cryptographic puzzle. When they’re successful, they’re rewarded with fresh Bitcoin in the Coinbase transaction for the block they’ve just finished mining.
When the Bitcoin network first kicked off circa 2009, this reward was worth 50 Bitcoin, and the protocol dictates that this amount decreases by half every time 210,000 blocks have been mined, which occurs approximately every four years.
In crypto circles this is known as a “halving”. The last halving happened in May of 2020 and cut the block reward down to 6.25 bitcoin per block; current projections have the next halving coming up sometime around April or May of 2024, which will be here sooner than you think.
Why Does the Bitcoin Halving Matter?
There are a few reasons why the Bitcoin halving is important.
The first is theoretical. When Satoshi Nakamoto mined Bitcoin’s genesis block, he famously included a headline from Britain’s The Times:
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
Though he didn’t offer any explanation, this is but one of many pieces of evidence that Bitcoin was intended to act as a hedge against the malfeasance of money-printing central banks, whose endless inflation of fiat currency drives prices up and erodes the value of savings.
How is Bitcoin supposed to perform this function? This blog post isn’t the place for a deep exploration of monetary economics, but we can make a few high-level comments nevertheless.
Satoshi Nakamoto built the Bitcoin protocol to aggressively constrain the supply of Bitcoin over the long term. There will only ever be so much Bitcoin in existence, it’s released at a steady, predictable rate, and it’s issued in smaller and smaller amounts over time.
Assuming that the demand for Bitcoin doesn’t collapse, this should work to make it more valuable as the years go by, instead of less. Rather than saving in a fiat currency that’s gradually becoming worthless, in other words, you now have the option of investing in an asset that’s gradually becoming worth more.
More prosaically, it’s worth knowing about the halving because Bitcoin tends to be quite volatile before, during, and after a halving. If you’re trading crypto assets (or just interested in how these markets work), it’s worth paying careful attention to what’s going on during a Bitcoin halving. Bitcoin’s general value also tends to end up higher once the halving dust settles.
(Note: as always, nothing in this piece should be construed as financial or investment advice.)
What Does This Mean for Core?
From the beginning, the Core blockchain has been profoundly aligned with Bitcoin. It’s founded on the same basic principles and seeks to serve the same long-term goals.
This plays out in everything from the network’s design all the way up to its branding efforts, but in the context of Bitcoin halving, the most important thing to understand is how Core’s Satoshi Plus Consensus mechanism will help subsidize future mining operations.
You don’t have to be a mathematician to see that decreasing Bitcoin rewards could eventually end up being a problem for miners. Sure, if the price of Bitcoin skyrockets they probably won’t care all that much if they’re getting fewer Bitcoin for each block they mine. But there’s considerable debate over whether this will occur, and it still leaves unanswered the question of how miners will get paid when the last bitcoin is mined circa 2140.
Satoshi Plus can help. It’s made up of two major pieces, Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Delegated Proof of Work (DPoW). With DPoW, Bitcoin miners can vote for a Core validator by writing that validator’s information into the Bitcoin block headers they mine. If the validator they voted for successfully mines a Core block, some of the rewards the validator receives go back to the Bitcoin miners that voted for them.
The basic idea is that Bitcoin miners will be partially subsidized by the Bitcoin-aligned network, Core, as the century progresses and Bitcoin rewards decrease. Ideally, this will mean that it remains profitable to secure the Bitcoin network, even long after block rewards have ceased.
Conclusion
Bitcoin halvings are a little like elections in the U.S. — they happen every four years, they generate a huge amount of press and market activity, and they give you a sense of what the world will be like until the next one occurs.
Hopefully, this piece has helped you contextualize Bitcoin halvings, and provided some useful context around the ways in which the Core blockchain has been aligned to help sustain Bitcoin in the coming centuries. #CoreDAO #Core
