The 2024 Bitcoin Halving event has been in the cryptocurrency conversation for a while, and has long been earmarked as the event that could help to end the “Crypto Winter” and start the next bull run. But, for many, the Bitcoin Halving 2024 is still a phrase shrouded in mystery.
In this post, we explain what a Bitcoin Halving is and look back at previous Bitcoin halving events to help us understand what might happen after the Bitcoin Halving in 2024.
A Bitcoin Halving is when the reward received by miners for creating a block on the Bitcoin blockchain is cut in half. These are pre-planned events that are coded into the Bitcoin protocol. To properly dive into the mechanism of the Halving event, we first need to know how the Bitcoin blockchain operates.
The protocol that governs the Bitcoin blockchain was outlined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, released in 2008. It is a decentralized network where cryptography (hence the term cryptocurrency) is used to confirm and verify transactions, and consensus on what has occurred on the network is achieved through a proof-of-work consensus algorithm.
In the Bitcoin protocol, a copy of all past transactions, called the ledger, is kept and verified by each node in the system. New transactions are added to the ledger in increments, called blocks. When a new block is added to the blockchain, all the nodes read it and verify the transactions. Blocks are created, also called mined, by miners. This process happens roughly every 10 minutes.
A network like Bitcoin cannot be built on trust alone— the whole goal of Bitcoin is to do away with the trusted middleman. It is for this reason that we have miners and the proof-of-work algorithm.
In a proof-of-work algorithm, miners must expend energy to
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