The bitcoin halvening of 2016 went as smooth as it could have gone. The network behaved fine, the protocol was stable, and the fresh 420,000th block on the blockchain was mined, with a reward of 12.5 BTC for the F2Pool mining pool who correctly solved it.
But how did price do? Quite fine, here's the 4-hour chart from Finex:
But how did price do? Quite fine, here's the 4-hour chart from Finex:
Notice in the highlighted area that there was actually a spike of volume right when the halvening happened on July 9th. This was actually a massive selloff of over 10,000 bitcoin in the few blocks before 420,000. Many traders panicked, but the strong hands won, and price stabilized later in the day and has remained sideways in the week after.
The inflation rate of bitcoin is now 4.08% rather than the over 7% it was with 25 BTC block reward. This is a nice decline which will reduce selling pressure in the market for miners getting fresh coins. Last time we had the halving of block reward from 50 to 25, the price mooned significantly in late 2012 and through 2013 where we bubbled to over $1,000 on Chinese adoption.
It's not sure that we will experience this kind of move again on this halving, but traders are certainly on guard.
The inflation rate of bitcoin is now 4.08% rather than the over 7% it was with 25 BTC block reward. This is a nice decline which will reduce selling pressure in the market for miners getting fresh coins. Last time we had the halving of block reward from 50 to 25, the price mooned significantly in late 2012 and through 2013 where we bubbled to over $1,000 on Chinese adoption.
It's not sure that we will experience this kind of move again on this halving, but traders are certainly on guard.