Bitcoin Block Reward Halving Countdown
Reward-Drop ETA date: 12 Jul 2016 07:15:12
Gonna be an epic summer this year
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The bitcoin mining system ensures that there will always be a constant increase in the bitcoin supply until all of the coins have been mined. Even if demand for bitcoin falls, miners will continue to pump out new coins. With gold, miners deal with falling demand by selling larger portions of their products to industry or by decreasing output. Neither of these things are possible with bitcoin; the actual tokens have no industrial use, and a dynamic block reward would require major overhauls to the Bitcoin protocol that would likely be unpopular. Thus, the bitcoin supply will constantly increase at a steady rate until all the coins have been mined, regardless of demand. Even after the supply has been completely mined, the lack of industrial use leaves no avenue for coins to flow into when demand falls below the supply.
industry-bitcoinistBitcoin is not at a complete disadvantage when it comes to short-run inflation, however. The Bitcoin protocol has block reward halvenings, where the amount of bitcoins gained from successfully hashing a block is cut in half. This feature keeps bitcoin’s short term inflation restrained, as the rate of growth is periodically decreased.
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Will be interesting to see how the altcoin markets will follow
