Bitcoin Mining Reward About To Halve

First time accepted submitter ASDFnz writes "The reward for successfully completing a block (also called mining) is about to halve from 50 bitcoins to 25. From the article: 'Bitcoin is built so that this reward is halved every 210,000 blocks solved. The idea is as bitcoin grows the transaction fees become the main part of the reward and the introduction of new bitcoins slows down to a trickle. This also means that there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins in circulation.' You can watch the countdown here."

Comments

Re:Seems like the limit is too low for a viable

[Wonko the Sane]

Yea it's too bad nobody ever though of that or else they might have made sure each one is divisible to eight decimal places or something.

Re:Bitcoins built-in failure

[francium de neobie]

A BitCoin can be divided up into 8 decimal digits. So one BitCoin contains 1 billion discrete units that can be used for transactions.

Re:What does it calculate?

[ais523]

It's a proof-of-work calculation that records a transaction history. Basically, it's to prevent double-spending; if someone attempts to transfer the same bitcoin to two different people, the person who gets it is the person who had more computational effort go into recording them as having it. If the amount of computational effort in recording transaction histories were low enough, someone could double-spend by recording an alternative history on a powerful computer and having it supersede the transaction history everyone thought they were using.

In order to encourage people to put effort into recording the history, there's a reward for doing so. This lead (perhaps predictably) to "mining", where people race to record the transaction history first in order to get the reward.

So there is a purpose to mining, but it's only to keep the Bitcoin system itself running. If people stopped mining (perhaps because the reward got low enough), Bitcoin would collapse. (It's envisaged that once the mining reward gets low enough, people transferring bitcoins will pay a transfer fee to the miners to encourage them to keep mining, and they'd get their income that way instead.)

Re:Quick, calculate me another way to profit.

[cultiv8]

So rent an apartment where electricity is included; most rental agreements don't have anything that specifically forbids bitcoin mining.

Re:Quick find all the people that care

[Anonymous Coward]

Gold has actual mechanical uses (electrical contacts.) It also has bauble value.

BitCoins have zero intrinsic value, and they require electric and Internet connectivity to be used. Gold requires a civilization level just a step above pure anarchy to be useful.

IMHO, it is sort of suspicious that there is this ramp where early adopters get these bonuses, and people hopping on late end up having to put a lot more resources in for the same coins... that combined with the value of the currency going up/down in insane swings, makes it useless as anything other than a novelty.

Re:Austrian economics

[Wizard Drongo]

There are services that will do this for you (ie. allow you to buy from Amazon using 'coin.) Admittedly, you're then beholden to that third-party who actually does the buying in your stead, rather than direct with Amazon, but nonetheless, without changing bitcoin into another currency, you can buy stuff on Amazon, and eBay, and a number of other sites, not to mention the ton of smaller, but no-less-useful sites that allow you to trade directly using Bitcoin...

Re:Quick, calculate me another way to profit.

[icebraining]

Communism never meant you could use whatever you want; not in theory, nor in practice. The principle was "to each according to his need".