What are possible scenarios for the block halving?

[Sefton]

Since it's a known future event, the halving should not affect the price.

Bitcoin value is mainly psychological. I expect many people will start panic buying if they see the price start to rise near the halving which I expect it will. This can have a knock on effect too.

Mining activity, though, sees a big cut in revenue, and some miners are going to drop out. Miners presumably have run spreadsheets and know what gear goes to negative ROI after the halving, and will presumably have planned things so it more than paid for itself well before the cutoff date.

How do you know? Maybe due to the lower supply of bitcoins the price may rise?

[LMGTFY]

Since it's a known future event, the halving should not affect the price.

Bitcoin value is mainly psychological. I expect many people will start panic buying if they see the price start to rise near the halving which I expect it will. This can have a knock on effect too.

Mining activity, though, sees a big cut in revenue, and some miners are going to drop out. Miners presumably have run spreadsheets and know what gear goes to negative ROI after the halving, and will presumably have planned things so it more than paid for itself well before the cutoff date.

How do you know? Maybe due to the lower supply of bitcoins the price may rise?

We know that the block reward will decrease from 25 to 12.5 BTC per block, and it's reasonable to assume that rational miners not only also know this, but have factored it into their ROI calculations.

We know what the new supply of BTC will be each block - it'll be 12.5 after the block reward halves. What we don't know, but can attempt to extrapolate from current data, is non-new supply - long-term holders (for example) converting BTC to fiat, the vendor of those exciting new ACME widgets (which are only sold for BTC) needing to convert BTC to fiat to pay their suppliers, short-term speculators needing to close long positions, etc. We also don't know - but can attempt to extrapolate, guess, whatever - what demand will be like (people buying ACME widgets will create demand, etc).

tl;dr - it's all down to supply and demand. Do your best to calculate what will happen to supply after the halving, and to demand after the halving, and you have as good an answer as anybody else! Anything else is just noise, people's wild-assed guesses, predictions based on something that happened once before, etc.

[Searing]

 Well by halving in august 2016 lets say difficulty doubles....and now the halving ....which means

 the price will still be at 250 or so and 'sideways' (its how btc rolls now)

(damn that is a depressing couple of lines there above...scared myself)

[Pursuer]

it is all going to be about the supply and demand. the demand was high enough that it was able to keep the price at this level for a long time. and in the future if this doesn't change and also goes higher, and additionally none of the whales decide to dump a sudden big amount on the market I think the price can easily start going up to > $300 and higher from there on.

[Skeksis]

it is all going to be about the supply and demand. the demand was high enough that it was able to keep the price at this level for a long time. and in the future if this doesn't change and also goes higher, and additionally none of the whales decide to dump a sudden big amount on the market I think the price can easily start going up to > $300 and higher from there on.

The trouble is the demand for coins isnt really that high at the moment. Hopefully there will be some good news before the halving which will get bitcoin some mainstream attention but without it I don't think bitcoin will rise much.

[Feri22]

with LTC nothing happened after halving so not sure

I don't agree with your post. When you look at LTC charts, the LTC price increased BEFORE the halving like crazy to 8 USD...from 1.25 USD...Now it is at 3.00 USD...so from my view the LTC halving doubled the price

[Nagle]

How do you know? Maybe due to the lower supply of bitcoins the price may rise?

The supply of Bitcoins is all Bitcoins available for sale. Bitcoin is about 2/3 mined already. There's no shortage of Bitcoins for sale on the exchanges.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Historically the price goes up fairly significantly as a result of block reward halvings. It's pretty simple & should 'in theory' be repeated again -

Less supply + More demand = Increase in price.

[johnyj]

During last halving, many people already exhausted their hash power on GPUs due to difficulty rise, and the effect of reward drop was quite significant, so that many people are forced to shutdown, leave mining to those who have free electricity and FPGA

Similarly, after next reward halving, only those with free electricity or high efficient rigs will stay online

However, the arriving of ASIC miner also happened around the same time frame during last halving. Just one months following the halving, ASIC miner and Avalon delivered their mining equipment and caused a panic buy around the world, raised the bitcoin price by 10x

But this time this kind of leap in mining technology is no longer possible(a quantum miner is still decades if not centuries away). So the anticipated change in mining landscape is limited, thus the price might not get a huge boost

From daily coin supply point of view though, the reduce in daily coin supply is still significant (next time it will have less impact). Suppose that the daily coin supply on market is 5000 coins (including cashing out from previous holders), where 1800 coins are contributed from mining (suppose miners hold 50% of their coins), the reward halving will reduce that figure to 900 coins, thus cut daily coin supply on market by about 18%, so a price rise of 18% is still likely

[MasterYii]

What things could happen with the btc price when the block halving occurs? will the price go down due to miners cashing out? or will the block chain slow down due to miners shutting off their mining equipment? will the price go up because of less daily bitcoin created? what will likely happen?

Bitcoin will be more known to other people and if this happens then price will increase. That s whats going to happen.

[Ceizer54]

What things could happen with the btc price when the block halving occurs? will the price go down due to miners cashing out? or will the block chain slow down due to miners shutting off their mining equipment? will the price go up because of less daily bitcoin created? what will likely happen?

Follwing the previews trenda bitcoin is increased when it got halved from 50 to 25 so i am pretty sure it's simple supply and demand..Supply will be halved next hear(12 bitcoins each block) so we can expect increase in the bitcoin as many of us wants it
but yes some miners can quit mining because of high difficulty in mining and less reward but i think it won't affect bitcoin network and price at all as there are so much miners and miner farms that are performing mining continuously

[lexuz]

Price will double if demand stays exactly the same. Most likely demand will increase before the halving though.

Yeah demand is needed for increase the price but halving is important too. I guess that both it's like symbiotic mutualism

[Nami]

What things could happen with the btc price when the block halving occurs? will the price go down due to miners cashing out? or will the block chain slow down due to miners shutting off their mining equipment? will the price go up because of less daily bitcoin created? what will likely happen?

Yeah the price will rise up in that scenario.

[tokeweed]

What things could happen with the btc price when the block halving occurs? will the price go down due to miners cashing out? or will the block chain slow down due to miners shutting off their mining equipment? will the price go up because of less daily bitcoin created? what will likely happen?

Miners would have to sell more as the rewards are less to maintain their operations.

[BitofaN1]

What things could happen with the btc price when the block halving occurs? will the price go down due to miners cashing out? or will the block chain slow down due to miners shutting off their mining equipment? will the price go up because of less daily bitcoin created? what will likely happen?

Miners would have to sell more as the rewards are less to maintain their operations.

Assuming they don't already sell most of their coins.But no one really seems to know what % of coins are held by miners in hope of future gains.If we knew that, then it would be easy to make a prediction for the 2016 halving.

[dloghwak]

with LTC nothing happened after halving so not sure

I don't agree with your post. When you look at LTC charts, the LTC price increased BEFORE the halving like crazy to 8 USD...from 1.25 USD...Now it is at 3.00 USD...so from my view the LTC halving doubled the price

The rise in LTC was caused by a chinese ponzi. https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/3ecwtq/collapse_of_chinese_ltc_ponzi/
The main reason was NOT the halving.

[tokeweed]

What things could happen with the btc price when the block halving occurs? will the price go down due to miners cashing out? or will the block chain slow down due to miners shutting off their mining equipment? will the price go up because of less daily bitcoin created? what will likely happen?

Miners would have to sell more as the rewards are less to maintain their operations.

Assuming they don't already sell most of their coins.But no one really seems to know what % of coins are held by miners in hope of future gains.If we knew that, then it would be easy to make a prediction for the 2016 halving.

If they already sell most of their coins and the halving would make it unprofitable and thereby forced to shut down.  That isn't a good scenario as well.

[BitofaN1]

What things could happen with the btc price when the block halving occurs? will the price go down due to miners cashing out? or will the block chain slow down due to miners shutting off their mining equipment? will the price go up because of less daily bitcoin created? what will likely happen?

Miners would have to sell more as the rewards are less to maintain their operations.

Assuming they don't already sell most of their coins.But no one really seems to know what % of coins are held by miners in hope of future gains.If we knew that, then it would be easy to make a prediction for the 2016 halving.

If they already sell most of their coins and the halving would make it unprofitable and thereby forced to shut down.  That isn't a good scenario as well.

But, if demand is greater than the supply of the most cost efficient miners, price will have to rise.That would be the only outcome I see.

[randy8777]

with LTC nothing happened after halving so not sure

I don't agree with your post. When you look at LTC charts, the LTC price increased BEFORE the halving like crazy to 8 USD...from 1.25 USD...Now it is at 3.00 USD...so from my view the LTC halving doubled the price

The rise in LTC was caused by a chinese ponzi. https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/3ecwtq/collapse_of_chinese_ltc_ponzi/
The main reason was NOT the halving.

less experienced traders don't do or at least don't do enough research of the thing they invest in. they just see dollar signs. the group that caused the ltc price to reach $8 surely made millions.

[iram66680]

Either difficulty will drop as mining will become profitable for users or 16nm will be available to the masses, making mining profitable and the price would rise due to the limited supply per day.