Posted by New York: After the Bitcoin ‘halving’ event on April 19, the cryptocurrency’s price witnessed a minor decline of 0.47 per cent to settle at Rs 58,89,117. Bitcoin slashed the incentives by 50 per cent to miners in half for the fourth time in its history, effectively reducing new production of the world’s largest cryptocurrency. It may be noted Bitcoin network doesn’t allow over supply and has a limited supply; i.e. only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist.
Post Bitcoin Halving event, JPMorgan predicted slight downside in the cryptocurrency and, while Deutsche Bank said it doesn’t expects the price to increase significantly.
What is Bitcoin Halving
Bitcoin ‘halving’ occurs roughly every four years, which is aimed at impacting the production of bitcoin. “Miners use farms of noisy, specialised computers to solve convoluted math puzzles; and when they complete one, they get a fixed number of bitcoins as a reward,” AP reported. Mining is a distributed consensus system that is used to confirm pending transactions by including them in the block chain.
As the name suggests, the Bitcoin Halving event cuts the fixed income in half. So, when the mining reward falls, automatically the number of new bitcoins entering the market reduces. This helps the supply of coins available to satisfy demand grows more slowly.
Following Friday’s halving event bitcoin’s price was reported at $63,907 per CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin’s all-time-high was recorded at $73,750 in March 2024.