Bitcoin Halving Countdown

When Is The Next Bitcoin Halving?

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What Is The Bitcoin Halving?

The Bitcoin Halving is when the block subsidy that’s rewarded to Bitcoin miners is halved. Currently the block subsidy is 3.125 BTC, but after the next halving it will reduce to 1.5625 BTC.

Note: The existing circulating supply of all bitcoins remains the same before and after each halving. It’s only the rate at which new bitcoins are minted that is halved.

The day of a Bitcoin halving is tracked and celebrated around the world by millions of Bitcoin users as it represents an event that only occurs once every 4 years. There have been four halving days so far, each one occurring after 210,000 blocks have been mined and this tradition will continue according to the bitcoin halving schedule below.

This type of fixed and dependable monetary policy is quite different to how traditional fiat currencies operate as they’re instead tied to central banks that dictate how their currency is distributed (aka printed). This also means it’s constantly changing and controlled entirely by a select few, who usually aren’t even democratically elected.

Why Halving Dates Are Approximate

Although we humans measure time with calendar days, dates and years, Bitcoin is a bit different. It measures time in blocks. One block is mined roughly every 10 minutes on average and so 210,000 blocks is about 4 years.

210,000 Blocks * 10 Minutes = 2,100,000 Minutes = 35,000 Hours = 3.9927 Years

While one block is mined on average every 10 minutes, it’s not always exactly every 10 minutes. As you can see below in this random selection of mined blocks, the first block was mined after 6 minutes, the second after 16 minutes and so on.

This means that the next BTC halving date isn’t known until it happens. When block 1,050,000 is mined we’ll have the exact time and date for the 2028 Bitcoin halving, but until then we can only give a rough estimate on future halving dates.

Historic & Future Bitcoin Halving Dates

Below are all the historic and future Bitcoin halving dates. As you can see, they occur every 210,000 blocks and will continue until around 2140 which will be the last Bitcoin halving. After this, the Block Subsidy will be reduced to 0 and the Block Reward will be entirely made up of just transaction fees.

How Does The Bitcoin Halving Actually Work?

The Bitcoin Halving event works by automatically cutting the Block Subsidy amount in half every 210,000 blocks. This is done by the Bitcoin Core code that is run on all Bitcoin Full Nodes and there is nothing that holders of bitcoin need to do, the Bitcoin Network takes care of it automatically.

Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto decided to fairly distribute the 21 million bitcoins by steadily rewarding it to Bitcoin Miners who help operate the network with the bitcoin Block Reward.

The Block Reward is paid out to miners that successfully add a new, valid block to the Bitcoin Blockchain and is made up of two parts:

Block Reward = Block Subsidy + Transaction Fees

The Block Subsidy is freshly minted bitcoins that are added to the network as part of the reward for miners doing Proof-of-Work (PoW). This is the part that gets halved every 210,000 blocks. The transaction fees are just what people are paying to have their transactions included in the block and are already existing bitcoins.

When Bitcoin first started, the Block Subsidy was 50 BTC. Each time someone mined a new block, they would get all the transaction fees and the ability to spend 50 new bitcoins. As you can see, this is a huge incentive and a much bigger bitcoin reward than what miners get now.

Why Is The Bitcoin Halving Important?

When creating a new network, one of the core problems is how to bootstrap it. That is, how do you get people to use it when it’s not actually that useful at the start. This is because the utility of a network like Bitcoin grows as more people use it. This is called the Network Effect.

For example, it’s not hard to convince someone to use the Internet now that there’s billions of people using it. However if there were only 5 random people using it… well it wouldn’t really be much fun would it! The Bitcoin halving helps to encourage people to become Bitcoin Miners earlier on as they get much larger block rewards back then.

As each halving occurs, it also changes bitcoin’s inflation rate in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Currently the Bitcoin money supply increases or inflates at a rate of around 0.8% p.a. That’s a lot better than the current inflation rates we’re seeing across the world with fiat currencies, but once the next halving hits it’ll be reduced even further to around 0.4%.

How Does The Bitcoin Halving Affect The Bitcoin Price?

Each Bitcoin Halving cycle has had a distinct influence on the Bitcoin price, all of them hugely positive.

The reason for this is actually pretty basic. When the halving happens the supply of new bitcoins that are mined each day reduces by half instantly. This huge reduction in supply happens while the demand for bitcoin stays basically the same. Economics 101 states that if supply is reduced while demand is kept the same, the BTC price should increase.

While the actual day of the halving doesn’t usually impact bitcoin’s price, it’s clear from the past two that when you zoom out a bit there’s a huge appreciation in the price of bitcoin that has happened every time. Will this happen again in 2028? No one can say, least of all us, but it seems like a reasonable theory.

How Many Bitcoin Halvings Will There Be?

There will be 33 bitcoin halving events according to the Bitcoin protocol in total with 4 that have already happened so far in bitcoin halving history.

Interestingly, there is no actual “21 million supply limit” in the Bitcoin Core code. Instead, the total supply of bitcoin is limited to just under 21 million bitcoins by just 6 lines of code shown below that calculates the block subsidy. This Bitcoin Core code is located in the “validation.cpp” file under bitcoin/src/.

What it does is figure out how many Bitcoin Halving events have happened, then calculates the size of the block subsidy that’s given to miners for that block. There have been 4 past bitcoin halvings and the block subsidy is 3.125 BTC. Due to this specific code, there will only ever be a total of 33 halvings.

As the bitcoin block height increases over time, the block subsidy gets cut in half more and more. Eventually it reaches the limit of decimal places (8) and we go from a block subsidy of 1 Satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) to 0 Satoshi, as the code does not allow for fractions of a Satoshi to exist.

This will be the 33rd and last halving which is estimated to happen in 2140.

What Happens to Mining Fees When Bitcoin’s Supply Limit Is Reached?

As stated above, the Block Reward is paid out to miners that successfully add new, valid bitcoin blocks to the Bitcoin Blockchain and is made up of two parts:

Block Reward = Block Subsidy + Transaction Fees

Once all bitcoins have been minted by about 2140, the Block Subsidy will go to 0. At this point the fees that miners get (the Block Reward) will simple equal the Transaction Fees.

While it’s true that once the limited total bitcoin supply is reached miners won’t receive any more block subsidies, this is far off into the future. It’s also estimated that the transaction processing fees will have long taken over as the main source of mining rewards before this 2140 date is reached.

The bitcoin mining industry is already getting more and more of the mining reward from bitcoin transaction fees and this is seen as a healthy thing for the bitcoin ecosystem in general. As the number of bitcoins created decreases, it’s also likely that it will increase bitcoin’s price too. This will mean that these relatively smaller fees will become more and more valuable over time.

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