Crypto News- Bitcoin (BTC) took a dip, clocking in at $37,484, marking the 11th anniversary of its inaugural halving. This milestone prompts a journey through Bitcoin’s past, setting the stage for the impending halving projected for April 2024.
Nearly 15 years ago, on January 3, 2009, the first Bitcoin transaction unfolded. This happened a few months post the release of the Bitcoin white paper by the mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in October 2008.
Bitcoin’s First Halving Anniversary: The Evolution from 12 Dollars to 37,000 Dollars
Fast forward to November 28, 2012, and we witness the maiden halving event, occurring three years and ten months post the first block’s mining. Bitcoin traded at a meager $12 during this event, a staggering 308,200% below its current valuation per CoinGecko.
While Nakamoto’s white paper didn’t explicitly delve into Bitcoin’s halving and the capped supply of 21 million, it hinted at mechanisms controlling BTC creation. In Nakamoto’s words: “To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they’re generated too fast, the difficulty increases.”
Although Nakamoto’s document didn’t delve deeply into halving, the Bitcoin source code on GitHub clearly outlines the halving mechanism, emphasizing a halving of miner rewards every 210,000 blocks, occurring approximately every four years.
This programmed halving was integral to combating inflation and ensuring scarcity in BTC mining. Pre-halving, miners enjoyed a hefty 50 BTC per block, but this dropped to 25 BTC in 2012 and further to 12.5 BTC in 2016. The most recent halving in 2020 sliced the subsidy to 6.25 BTC.
Bitcoin’s scarcity, amplified by halving events, historically influenced its price cycles. A year after its first halving, BTC soared to nearly $1,000. The second halving initiated a 350% surge, propelling BTC to record highs of almost $20,000 in December 2017. Following the third halving in 2020, BTC reached an all-time peak of almost $69,000 in November 2021.
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