Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, experienced its first halving on this day 11 years ago. As the community celebrates the anniversary, it is the right time to reconsider some of Bitcoin’s historical milestones ahead of the next halving expected in April 2024.
The first Bitcoin transaction took place nearly 15 years ago on January 3, 2009, a few months after the pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, published the Bitcoin white paper in October 2008.
On November 28, 2012, three years and 10 months after mining the first block of Bitcoin, the first halving occurred. At that time, Bitcoin was trading at a price of around $12, according to StatMuse data, or 308,200 percent below the current price, according to CoinGecko data.
Although the issuance of new Bitcoins is halved and the supply cap of the digital currency at 21 million is not directly described in Nakamoto’s white paper, the document still hints at certain mechanisms for controlling the creation of new Bitcoins.
– To compensate for the increase in hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the difficulty in proof-of-work is determined by a moving average that targets the average number of blocks per hour. If they are generated too quickly, the mining difficulty increases – states the white paper.
Unlike some basic information in the white paper, the aspect of halving is mentioned in the original Bitcoin code. Halving is specifically available in the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository in the validation.cpp file and indicates that the mining block subsidy is halved every 210,000 blocks, which will occur every four years.
The halving mechanism for Bitcoin is programmed into the mining algorithm to combat inflation by maintaining scarcity.
