By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 20th, 2024
Bitcoin price surges over 5% to trade above $9,700 at the time of reporting. The rally comes as the clocks show 4 days remaining until the BTC halving event.
Bitcoin price continues soaring as the hype with BTC halving keeping most enthusiasts awake now and then. Bitcoin halving is expected to happen in just 4 days. The asset was up 6.12% after adding around $600 to trade $9,773.07 at the time of reporting. It has broken past several resistance levels in the past few days setting a record rise amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Different ideas have been thrown out through the mainstream media and also social media platforms for the mass to consume. For sure, the only thing remaining is to wait for the event and the outcome.
Every move the instrument makes is getting such an analysis and in turn, carrying with it a lot of hype. Coincidentally, BTC rally is carrying with it several altcoins like ETH and XRP, which have been rising almost at the same pace.
XRP is trading on the top border of a falling channel on the daily chart, whereby once the level is completely dealt with, the instrument will be headed towards $12k and above.
As a result of the upcoming halving, miners will be compelled to upgrade their mining hardware machines to newer and efficient models. The current popular S9 model manufactured by Bitmain will have to be upgraded to meet the demand of the increased hash rate, mining difficulty and also increased competition for the rare commodity.
More institutional miners are likely to emerge away from China, which has dominated the mining industry in the past years. With the oil industry proving not profitable, it is anticipated that some oil and gas companies might result in mining BTC to offset their losses.
Bitcoin Halving in 4 Days: What to Wait
An article posted at Decrypt highlighted a deep dive into the code that will make Bitcoin halving occur, explaining it in layman language for all to understand. With a background into the event, it will explain a bit further into details pertaining to the halving.
When Bitcoin was created over a decade ago, the block reward was initially set to 50 BTC per block in ten minutes. As a result, the entire bitcoins would be mined in less than eight years, which is not the intended mechanism of supply by the creator.
To solve the problem, the network code contains a function to see the reward rate is controlled. A single line of code that instructed the network to halve the rewards going to miners every 210,000 block.
The main factors include:
- Consensus.nSubsidyHalvingInterval=210,000
- nHeight=current block height
- COIN= 100,000,000 (No of Satoshis in 1 BTC)
- nSubsidy=The Subsidy for mining 1 block
The function in the source code is called the ‘GetBlockSubsidy’, which calculates the subsidy for mining a block. Hence determining how much miners get. The variable ‘halvings’ calculates the No of halving events by dividing the current block height by a constant value of 210,000.