Bitcoin Forum

Everyone's got their panties twisted over the first block reward drop, but is there any approximate estimate for the time between the 25 to 12.5 block drop?

Anyone Investing in Long term Hardware this year will need to take that into account.

I have the feeling it'll be about the same as the period between the start of bitcoin and the first drop, but I have no source for that.

i does not get my pants twisted, i don't mine.

~4 years between every reward adjustment.

Dodging the hard truth are we?   :P

Always. but still only miners, gets there panties twisted.

Anyone have an idea as to why the reward drops are so sharp. Any theory as to why the drop isn't monthly, but in smaller portions?

My only guess is it was easier to do at the time (I consider that this was a hobby project at first, and corners were cut).

As pointed out before, there are plenty of things that, in hind sight, should've been done differently.

Legend has it that there were many iterations of "BitCoin" before the present one, and this was never meant to be the final version, but it escaped the lab and spread like wildfire.

Directed by...

I don't think anyone has a definitive answer on why it was done.

The only real benefit I see is that the current behavior is easy to explain and understand.  It is clear what the block reward will be at any given time, and it is easy to see how the sequence of block rewards results in a total of 21 million coins: 50 + 25 + 12.5 + ... = 100.  100 * 210,000 = 21,000,000.  (In reality the total is slightly less than 21 million because the reward is truncated to 8 decimal places.)

its not easier its just a "random" number in the code.
the reason for the sharpness of the drops(halving) is because its easy, and platform independent. dividing by 2, is approximately the same as shifting the bits one the right, except its more "defined"/essential in a computer.
dividing 3 by 2, could on different processor architectures give either 1 or 2 or 1.5 ... which is not good for interoperately.
shifting one bit of 3 always gives 1

There's a BIP for this
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=70117.0

Looking into it, I discovered it was more of a very friendly programming way of doing it.
I mean...c'mon, do you really think they had the vision it would get to where it is now?
I'm sure in hindsight, they would have done some things a lot differently, but I don't think it matters because
if anything ever becomes a serious enough issue, we'll just update!

Yup.  It is the miners that will be impacted the most.  The bitcoin network, speculators, etc, ..   will probably be barely considered an event even, because we know when (about December 9th, plus or minus a week, roughly) and how much (50 BTC to 25 BTC).

because it's better to have a value that changes every 2 years than some steadily decreasing value that needs a calculator to calculate. easier to do mental calculations, i suppose.