By
Tolu Ajiboye
April 23rd, 2024
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) halving event is expected to happen today at block 630,000. The number of coins created every 10 minutes will fall from 12.5 to 6.25.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which appeared as a result of certain altercations in the Bitcoin blockchain in 2017, is getting closer to a very important milestone, its first halving event.
Expected to hit block 630,000 by Wednesday morning, Eastern time, the amount of BCH coin every 10 minutes will fall by half marking the first BCH halving. Some spectators on Reddit said they would monitor the halving event as it unfolds on the blockchain.
The BCH halving event is similar but smaller to what will happen next month to BTC as BCH’s market cap is worth about twenty-fifth of BTC.
In the same light, Bitcoin SV (BSV), that forked off from BCH, will also be halved a day after BCH’s halving event.
The halving is seen as monumental since it highlights that the supply of the coin is fixed, a characteristic that differentiates BTC and its doppelgangers from most national currencies. Also, it is seen as an essential variable that made bitcoin price increases in the past.
This year BCH and BSV halving are happening early because BCH temporarily had a different algorithm dictating how quickly the mining difficulty would adjust, which for a time sped up the block creation process.
Possible Consequences of Early Bitcoin Cash Halving
With the BCH halving event coming quietly early this year, it is believed that certain unforeseen consequences are imminent.
Brad Jasper, BSV developer, said that these events will be “bad” for the respective cryptocurrencies in the nearest future. Jasper, in his analysis, explained that miners ordinarily are to leave for greener pastures temporarily.
With their primary source of income being block reward and halving would reduce it by half this time, the chain will be less lucrative to mine. On the other hand, BTC’s block rewards don’t halve for another month or more an eventuality that could make these cryptos lose hash power to BTC.
“When BSV/BCH halves, they will both lose hash power, likely to BTC,” Jasper said. In the long term, he believes, BSV will prevail due to its “utility” as a network that prioritizes transaction growth.
Norway-based Arcane Research agreed with the part about the loss of computing power in a report released recently but went further. If hash power declines, Arcane said, the two splinter cryptocurrencies will be more vulnerable to 51% attack, in which malicious actors gain control of the network.
But Jasper said he expects the situation will quickly change once BTC takes its turn and halves next month since it will no longer be more profitable to mine than BCH and BSV.
Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver, known in the early days as “Bitcoin Jesus” for his evangelism before defecting to the BCH camp, said BCH’s halving would be a “non-event” given BTC’s halving history.
“The last two were non-events, and I expect this one to be the same as the last two,” he said.