The 630,000th block that led to the halving of bitcoin has been mined. This cut the miners’ rewards by half, from the previous 12.5 BTC to the current 6.25 BTC, making them less available on the market.Â
As is known, a new block of bitcoin is mined about every 10 minutes. Halving occurs precisely after every 210,000 blocks, until it can no longer take place because it will result in a reward lower than a satoshi.
The first halving took place in late November 2012, when it went from 50 BTC to 25 BTC (at that time the value of a bitcoin was just $12) while the next halving took place in the second week of July 2016, going from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC and in that period the price of bitcoin had reached $650, an increase in 4 years of over 5300%.
The first halving has granted its miner 38 BTC thanks to very high fees, a total of 13.5 BTC of fees and a total of 457 transactions within it. The miner was unknown, while 4 years after the halving had only 0.5 BTC of fees and 1257 transactions, and in this case, the miner was F2Pool, a pool still active today with about 820 BTC in its possession.
The problems of the 2020 halving
The halving race has just ended, but it did not occur without problems which started from block 629989, the last block with all transactions having 6 confirmations.
It is interesting to note that block 629990 and the next one have the same timestamp and after 40 minutes the block 629992 hadn’t been seen yet.
In fact, 41 minutes have passed from one block to another, mined by F2Pool, while between this and the next one only 3 minutes have passed and it has been mined by Poolin.
The irregularities continued also for the following blocks, from 629993 to 629994 between which 20 minutes passed.
Block 629995 then was mined after 12 minutes and brought with it 1.1 Bitcoin (BTC).
Problems still at block 629998 which was mined by Poolin in a matter of minutes.
Surely it was a turbulent halving and that has often changed times.
Now all that remains is to wait until the next halving that will take place at block 840,000.
Who mined the block?
The miner of this 2020 bitcoin halving was AntPool who took home 6.25 BTC and a total of 0.9 BTC in fees with 3134 transactions, which at the current price are over $50,000.
Meanwhile, F2Pool has taken home a total of 62.5 BTC in the last 10 blocks.
