According to Cointelegraph: Today marks the 11th anniversary of Bitcoin’s first halving, a key milestone where the miner's reward for verifying transactions was cut in half to control the creation of new Bitcoins – a process that played a critical role in driving Bitcoin's price from $12 to its current value of $37,000.
Bitcoin's first halving occurred 11 years ago today, approximately four years after Bitcoin's initial transaction on January 3, 2009. This transaction followed Satoshi Nakamoto's publishing of the Bitcoin white paper officially introducing the premier cryptocurrency in late 2008.
On November 28, 2012, the halving event saw Bitcoin trading at about $12. Fast forward to today, it's trading at $37,424 as per CoinGecko data, representing a staggering increase of 308,200%.
While Nakamoto's white paper did not explicitly describe the halving process, nor Bitcoin's supply cap of 21 million coins, it gave an insightful overview of controlling new BTC generation mechanisms - on average, every four years or every 210,000 blocks, the block subsidy for miners gets halved.
Preceding the first halving, miners received 50 BTC rewards per block. Halving events in 2012 and 2016 cut the miner's subsidy to 25 and 12.5 BTC respectively. The latest halving in 2020 further reduced the subsidy to 6.25 BTC per block.
Historically, these halvings have driven Bitcoin price surges due to increased scarcity. A year post the first halving, Bitcoin's price peaked at $1,000 while the second event prompted a 350% surge over the following year, propelling Bitcoin to its then all-time high of roughly $20,000 in December 2017. In November 2021, following the third halving, Bitcoin hit $69,000.
As the crypto community anticipates the fourth Bitcoin halving, set for April 17, 2024, many supporters are bullish, hoping for potential approval of a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund by US securities regulators.
However, 2024 won't witness the last halving. The miner's reward is expected to be halved 34 times until it reaches 0 BTC, which is expected to occur once all 21 million Bitcoin are mined – projected around the year 2140.
