Bitcoin's Latest "Halving" Has Arrived

The "miners" who extract bitcoins through complex mathematics are facing a 50% pay cut — effectively reducing new production of the world's largest cryptocurrency once again, reported the Associated Press (AP).

Bitcoin "halving," a preprogrammed event that occurs roughly every four years, affects the production of bitcoin.

Bitcoin's latest "halving" occurred Friday night. Soon after the highly anticipated event, the price of bitcoin held steady at about $63,907. Now, all eyes are on what will happen down the road.

Beyond bitcoin's long-term price behavior, which relies heavily on other market conditions, experts point to potential impacts on the day-to-day operations of the asset's miners themselves.

However, as with everything in the volatile cryptoverse, the future is hard to predict, as reported by Mainichi Shimbun.

Bitcoin "halving," a preprogrammed event that occurs roughly every four years, affects the production of bitcoin.

Miners use farms of noisy, specialized computers to solve convoluted math puzzles, and when they complete one, they receive a fixed number of bitcoins as a reward. Halving does exactly what it sounds like — it cuts that fixed income in half.

And when the mining reward falls, so does the number of new bitcoins entering the market.

That means the supply of coins available to satisfy demand grows more slowly. Limited supply is one of bitcoin's key features. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist, and more than 19.5 million of them have already been mined, leaving fewer than 1.5 million left to be mined.