Roundup: Halving Retrospective

Bitcoin Halving: Remembering Epoch 4

At approximately 8:10pm New York time last Friday night, April 19th, the 840,000th bitcoin block was mined and bitcoin’s fourth halving event occurred.

Bitcoin price at time of each historical halving:

• November 28, 2012: $12.50
• July 9, 2016: $638.51
• May 11, 2020: $8,475
• April 19, 2024: $63,768

The halving refers to the 50% reduction in the block subsidy every 210,000 blocks, or roughly four years, and is a key event in the implementation of bitcoin’s programmatic monetary policy. This halving saw the block subsidy reduced from 6.25 BTC per block to 3.125 BTC per block.

A fun mathematical quirk of bitcoin’s supply release schedule is that the percentage of the total supply released in each mining epoch (the period of time between halvings) is equal to the block subsidy during that epoch. So, in Epoch 4 just completed, which had a block subsidy of 6.25, 6.25% of the total 21 million supply bitcoin was released. In the coming Epoch 5 with a block subsidy of 3.125, 3.125% of the total supply will be released.

With the 50% reduction in the block subsidy, the annual inflation rate for bitcoin drops from 1.7% down to 0.85%. This is an important milestone for bitcoin as the inflation rate is now below the long-term annual supply increase of gold, which is estimated to be ~1.7%. Bitcoin is now, officially, the hardest money on the planet.