How a bitcoin transaction gets confirmed
Your payment waits in a queue, a miner includes it in a block, and each later block makes reversing it harder.
What the Bitcoin halving actually does
About every four years, the reward for adding new blocks falls by half. It changes the rate of new supply, and its effect on price is debated.
The short version
New bitcoin is created as a reward for miners, the computers that compete to add each block of transactions. Every 210,000 blocks, roughly four years, that reward is cut in half. The 2024 halving reduced it to 3.125 bitcoin per block.
Why it exists
The schedule is written into Bitcoin’s rules. It limits the total supply to just under 21 million bitcoin, and it makes new issuance shrink over time in a way anyone can check.
What it doesn’t do
A halving doesn’t reduce the number of bitcoin that already exist. It also doesn’t guarantee a price rise: past halvings are few, and many other things were happening around them.
Miners feel the change directly, because half of their new-coin income disappears overnight. Those with higher costs may switch off machines if fee income and price don’t make up the difference.
Sources
[The Editor links primary sources here before publication.]
Disclosures
[AI use, holdings and commercial relationships are shown here.]