The Bitcoin Mint Rate Halving Approaches

The first time I heard about bitcoin was in the summer of 2010 while I was an undergraduate student researcher working at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. The idea of a block chain was pretty new then and the scientists I worked with were all in a broad spectrum of perspective on the idea. Many of them were skeptical that the stable network of computers needed to support the blockchain would be possible to establish. The whole idea seemed like a pie in the sky. Other scientists thought the idea was “cute” but didn't understand the utility of it since we already have banking systems that work fine. Personally, I was the excited young whipper snapper that thought it was going to change the world. 

Most of you reading this probably already are aware that the bitcoin block reward is going to cut in half soon. It happens every 210,000 blocks, and we are currently 839,664 block at the time of writing this sentence. The next halving will happen at the 840,000th block. The block reward rate when bitcoin started in 2009 was 50 BTC per block! On Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 the rate halved for the first time to 25 BTC per block. Then on Saturday, July 9th, 2016 it halved again to 12.5 BTC per block. The most recent halving, to 6.25 BTC per block happened on Monday, May 11th, 2020. Will it happen again on a Monday? My guess is it won't since there are about 350 blocks left before the halving and recently the block rate has been about 150 blocks per day. My guess is the block reward becomes 3.125 BTC on Friday or Saturday. This will be the 4 of a total of 32 total halving events of the BTC block reward.

Here is a chart from FOREX.com:

There has been a year long bull run after every halving so far that leads to an new all time high price of BTC. All the other crypto currencies go along for the ride with it. Right now might be one of the best times to buy some crypto because if history repeats itself you are gonna be on a ride up for the next year. Those Swiss scientists sure were wrong back in 2010. People are predicting the all time high in about a year will be over $100k per BTC!