The Bitcoin Halvening is Upon Us

And How You Can Cash-In (or Out) on This Fact.

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Never Forget. Christopher Steininger — ChristopherSteininger.com

On October 6th, 2014 the BearWhale was slain on the BitStamp exchange. The people at shapeshift.io commissioned two artists rendering of the event. The more humanistic version is depicted above. The other is a more hellenistic style of art seen on black and red figure greek pottery. Both are great, here’s the other version:

Matt Habel — https://www.etsy.com/shop/matthabel

The purpose of this post isn’t to discuss art history and it’s influence on Bitcoin. I really just wanted to leave a reminder that we are approaching a very important time in the world. No, I’m not talking about voting for the politician with the largest hands, and I’m not talking about the 2016 summer olympics in Rio, either. I’m referring to the second coming of The Halvening. Not familiar with the reward drop of 2009? Me neither. I discovered Bitcoin in late 2012.

To essentially spoon-feed this information to people would be unfair. For still unaware of what is meant by “halving the block size” I put together a sweet cut-and-paste job from their website:

The Halvening! Bitcoin Halving for Rocket Lovers _In the Bitcoin network, user transactions are grouped in blocks and recorded to a digital public ledger called a…_thehalvening.com

In the Bitcoin network, user transactions are grouped in blocks and recorded to a digital public ledger called a blockchain. Miners are in charge of this task, and receive a mining reward in the form of bitcoins for each block recorded.

The amount of bitcoins rewarded for each block decreases with time: it is halved every 4 years. This event, the moment when the mining reward is divided by 2, is commonly called “Bitcoin halving”. Other denominations are used: “reward drop”, “reward halving”, or simply “the halving” or “the Halvening” which is a popular meme among bitcoiners.

When Bitcoin was created in 2009, the initial reward was 50 bitcoins. In november 2012, it dropped to 25btc after the first halving. The second halving will take place in July 2016, decreasing the reward to 12.5btc.

I’m not trying to create speculation here. Actually, I’m attempting to exercise logic and reason with those reading this and the Halvening website. Most understand the fact that this directly affects the ROI (Return on Investment) of all Bitcoin mining operations. Then other begin to question what will happen to the Bitcoin price and begin buying more Bitcoin in anticipation of the block size being halved. The part that’s unfair is that some people buying Bitcoin for it’s future price don’t understand core principles of Bitcoin such as Controlled Supply, or even the Golden Rule of investing in anything.

Original BearWhale.

Remember the Golden Rule: Never invest more than you can afford to lose.

Controlled supply _A fixed money supply, or a supply altered only in accord with objective and calculable criteria, is a necessary…_en.bitcoin.it

If you really want to have a sound understanding of how this affects the Bitcoin price, then please do yourself a favor a read the article linked above about Controlled Supply. Only after reading through it that can you truly understand how the Halvening will affect Bitcoin and it’s speculation.

We can learn a lot from history, but it isn’t a reliable barometer when it comes to Bitcoin. Volatility has always been it’s biggest draw to bullish investors, but what does that say for the bearish ones? What happens when things begin to get shorted and distorted? There isn’t a Wall Street here. It’s just us and the computers.

Have I rustled your jimmies yet? Do they remain unrustled? Is unrustled a word? Probably not. Let me give it another shot by reminding everyone in Florida that the fine folks at Coinbase have been approved to operate their Bitcoin trading platform in our state! Coincidence? Probably.

Bitcoin Exchange - Coinbase _US based bitcoin Exchange with bitcoin trading API. Easy to deposit with Coinbase wallet, via bank transfers or bitcoin…_exchange.coinbase.com

Sign up and start trading Bitcoin today!