Bitcoin Forum

Halving block reward dates are stable and happens exactly each 4 years ? Or this is just an estimated date ?
According to this website for example : http://thehalvening.com/#1 , Halving block reward should be on 13 July , could this date change ? (after or before) and what could cause the changes ? having more miners should get things faster , no ?

it's just an estimated date on when the 420000th block will be mined. the block reward halves every 210000 blocks. the total mining hashrate and the difficulty can affect this estimation. it doesn't happen every 4 years exactly, but the algorithm makes it happen approximately every 4 years.

It's two weeks between difficulty changes. A massive injection of hot rod chips during that two week period is possibly going to solve the problems faster until the difficulty can catch up. The date has been creeping up.

I see but what if more miners or to be more specific "more mining farms" appears before the halving block reward , will that make the process faster or not ? or that will make it more difficult to mine and basically  we will get to halving slower instead of faster ?  ???

it should be faster. but not very much because the difficulty changes depending on how fast the last 2016 blocks were mined. (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate_results_in_a_given_difficulty.3F) and more miners means more hashrate and that in turn means faster mining and even more difficulty. so it shouldn't even make it even a week faster unless they throw some huge mining power in.

More miners means faster solving blocks, thus higher diff and thusly earlier halving date.

when the hashrate suddenly increase the diff need time to readjust, this can lead to more block mined than usual, more coins per day, and this will result in a fast halving date

so the fee era is probably much early than many think, still not early enough for us to be there

it may be 2 weeks later or earlier, but will happen in july anyways, becouse it counts how many blocks are mined, and accorting to average mine time, we can say that it will happen in july

I do not think that more big miners will start mining before the halving, they may wait after the halving happen to see if they will be able to get their ROI or the btc price will be the same will more mining difficulty.

that's would be a dumb move, don't you think? why wait and start mining after it's harder to get more bitcoins?

It's just an estimation as to when we will mine the 420,000th block. While it is most likely going to happen very closely to that date, it's never guaranteed.

They just calculate it based on how quickly we've been mining blocks in recent years and the level of growth/decline. You can bet the date would be set back really far if all the data centres that we now have were to suddenly explode but you can also bet that the date would be sooner if everyone realized the potential in Bitcoin and started up their own mining database (because, no, solo mining does NOT work anymore).

Honestly, though, those situations will most likely not happen in the short amount of time we have until having so I wouldn't be too surprised if the prediction is very accurate.

To reiterate posts in here and simplify it a bit...

On average, a block should be solved every 10 minutes, 2016 blocks roughly every 14 days (20,160 minutes), and 210,000 blocks every 4 years. A change in hashrate will affect that time slightly up or down depending on if miners leave or join respectively.
If blocks are being solved in 8 minutes, after 2016 blocks it may be only 11 days instead of 14, so difficulty rises to account for this, but difficulty retargets are not perfect and usually underestimates the effect. So this causes the halving to move closer as we approach it since there is nearly always miners joining the network and difficulty is always rising. Only if hashrate stayed the same, would we have a definite date for the halving.
This also works in reverse! If hashrate is declining, then the estimated date would move further away since the 2016 block difficulty retarget would end up being >14 days apart.

it can change be couple of days, but it will still happen injuly, unless all miners will stop mining bitcoins, but i don't think that it could happen, so halving will happen in july

It can change by week or two only, but it will happen in july, unless every miner will stop mining now, but i don't think that it could happen