Miners Hard at Work with Bitcoin Hash Rate Hitting an ATH by Soaring 45%; Happy Halving!

Halving is here.

Happy Halving 2020!! pic.twitter.com/QkGsLFzCmh

— PlanB (@100trillionUSD) May 11, 2020

The much-anticipated event is finally here. But before that, today the hash rate of the network jumped to yet another all-time high.

On May 3rd, the bitcoin network hash rate broke the high made on April 14th, which was another leg up from March 5th peak.

Now, today at 145.01 Eth/s or 145,009,688,592,710,792,997 H/s exactly, miners have dedicated, more now than ever, resources to the bitcoin network to capture as much of the 12.5 BTC they can hours before their 50% reduction.

This race that has the hash rate soaring by 45% in the past 24 hours also has the blocks coming in at 7.5 minutes.

Source: CoinWarz

Hash rate is basically the numerical value which is an estimate of how many hashes are being generated by miners to solve a given block.

Post-halving, the hash rate is expected to drop as the profitability of miners gets slashed by 50%. This will result in some inefficient and overleveraged miners to unplug their machines.

But historically, the hash rate recovers back to its peak a few days after the halving.

The magic of bitcoin!

The total supply of Bitcoin will ever be 21 million. But this third halving will slow down the mining of new coins to enter the supply.

Mining is basically a process where hardware competes to solve complex math problems and once a block is created, miners get a certain amount of reward. Initially, when bitcoin was first mined, the reward was set to 50 BTC per block.

If every block in the bitcoin network is mined in 10-minutes and at 50 BTC reward, it would take less than eight years to mine all the supply of bitcoin.

As such, the network contains code that decreases block rewards every four years or 210,000 blocks.

The code is:

The function in this code is “GetBlockSubsidy.” When the current block height, valuable “nHeight” is greater than 6,30,000, the system tells it’s time for halving. The maximum number of halvings would be 64.

As such, each halving cuts the block reward in half, and this halving will reduce the block rewards from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC.

This halving is “one small step for the blockchain, one giant leap for bitcoin,” said analyst Mati Greenspan.