Do you know what's gonna happen on 12th May? If not, Read On!!
Time to look into Bitcoin!
Halving! Halving! Halving!
Let me present you with some facts about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency.
There is a limit on the Bitcoins that can be generated. This was decided way back in 2009 and is set at 21 Million.
At the time of writing this post, 1 Bitcoin equals 8843 USD!
A block is mined approximately every 10 minutes, and currently, for mining 1 Block the Miner gets 12.5 Bitcoins.
Whenever a block, or a group of data is to be put on the Blockchain, it has to be verified by "Miners". Miners are specialised nodes that do extensive processing to become the first one to put a block on the chain after validating it. For every successful "Mining", the successful miner will get Bitcoins. This is how Bitcoins are generated.
If you are completely new to Crypto and Blockchain, I will suggest you to give "blockchain-above-and-beyond-bitcoin" a read first.
So what's going to happen on 12th May 2020?
If you do the maths you will realize that at the speed the Bitcoins are getting mined they will get exhausted soon. The developers of Bitcoin also realized this and they formulated the concept of Halving.
Basically, after mining of 210,000 Blocks, or approximately after every 4 Years, the mining reward gets reduced by half. So on 12th May,2020 this process will happen and the reward will reduce to 6.25 Bitcoins.
How the miners react to this change may make or break Bitcoin which can further hit all the other Altcoins! In 2016, after the halving, the price of Bitcoin jumped from ~250 to ~2500 USD between the year 2016-2017, which is about 10 times its starting value. Similar trends can be expected in May too, but considering the global pandemic and the ever-increasing consumption of energy that goes into mining a block, there is a possibility that it may also pull Bitcoin down drastically!
Thus, 12th May,2020 marks a historic day in the world of Cryptocurrency!!