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

Bitcoins built-in failure

[girlintraining]

If there's only 21 million bitcoins that can be made, then if a lot of people started using them, they'd have to share them. There's something to be said for currency that has a indivisible limit -- for example, the smallest unit of currency in the US is the penny, though everything is typically counted in dollars. But while bitcoins can be divided, it adds a lot of complexity to the system and extra tracking and auditing. And it's main feature, anonymity, isn't really all that anonymous -- cash has serial numbers but there's no log of transactions built into the dollar. Bitcoins require that transaction log. In a lot of ways, it's about as anonymous as using a credit card.

Quick find all the people that care

[Anonymous Coward]

and get them to exchange their gold and silver (actual resources with actual industrial use and hence value) so they can use this crappy fisherprice currency supported by grown up fisherprice playing spineless virtual beings.

Bitcoin? Again?

[Jawnn]

One word - STFU. Want more? How about "no real world value". Don't believe us? Try paying your taxes with BitCoin. Try buying much of anything with it, for that matter. Yes, yes, we can all dig up a few sites that, for now, will exchange things of value for BitCoin, but to consider that number anything but a statistically meaningless fraction is a fool's errand.
Done to death. Move on.