Babbitt Exclusive | Forty-five-day currency crisis in 35 days, halving or changing the three "Bitcoin" patterns

Bitcoin will usher in the third halving of its history in 37 days. As the only Chinese blockchain media that witnessed the first two halvings, Babbitt retains many precious historical manuscripts. In this article, based on Babbitt's historical manuscripts, I will show you the past and the present.

This article is divided into three parts: Section 1 briefly describes the basic concept of halving; Section 2 "Archaeology" has discussed the problems, analysis and results; Section 3 focuses on the difference of this halving, the author interviewed BTC, BCH and BSV community KOL discuss how to switch the calculation power of the three currencies in half.

Learn about halving in 1 minute

The first thing that needs to be clear is that halving is not an emergency, but a set of mechanisms that have been clearly stated in the white paper and accompanied by the birth and growth of Bitcoin. The so-called halving refers to the miner's reward for digging new blocks is reduced by half compared to the previous block reward. In the Bitcoin network, the halving is also related to the Bitcoin deflation issuance mechanism. The total amount of Bitcoin is up to 21 million, relying on the halving mechanism.

Specifically, the bitcoin block reward is initially 50, and when the reward occurs 210,000 times, the reward for each block is halved to 25 bitcoins; after waiting another 210,000 times, the block reward will be 12.5 Bitcoins; and so on, until the Bitcoin reward is reduced to 1 Satoshi (1 Bitcoin = 100 million Satoshi), the network no longer generates new Bitcoins, at this time the total number of Bitcoins is 21 million.

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Because the Bitcoin network generates an average block every 10 minutes, and 210,000 blocks are generated in about four years, there is a saying of "halving in four years". However, with the continuous improvement of the computing power of the entire network, the time for Bitcoin to halve is also advanced in advance, and it does not actually need 4 years.

According to data from QKL123, the first halving of Bitcoin occurred on November 28, 2012. At that time, the price of one Bitcoin was 76.89 yuan, and the inflation rate was 24.81%. The second halving time was on July 10, 2016. The Bitcoin price was 4328.8 yuan, and the inflation rate was 8.34%. The upcoming event Bitcoin halved for the third time, in mid-May, the current inflation rate is 1.79%.

Public opinion halved in the archaeological year

"History will not repeat itself, but it will always be strikingly similar." In 2012, the crypto community was still very small. The people who were attracted to Bitcoin and joined it had basically read at least Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper. Therefore, the community has little discussion about the first halving of Bitcoin. From the background of Babbitt, there is only one related article "Block Reward Halved for the First Time" .

By 2016, the Bitcoin community was already lively. From two months before the halving occurred, the community voiced one after another. The focus of discussion included currency price, computing power, security, and handling fees, just like today. What did people think of these problems at that time? What is the basis? Is it still true today? What was the result after the last halving?

1. Positive / negative impact on currency prices

First look at the effect of halving on prices. The author intercepted the price trend of bitcoin in the half year before and after the second round of halving in 2016 from QKL123. Before the halving, Bitcoin rose 73% in a month, and fell to 22% within 3 days after reaching a new high for a technical callback.

Before the current halving, bitcoin rose by more than 50% from the end of last year to February of this year, and then began a downward trend, and extreme prices broke out on 3.12. In contrast, before the two rounds of bitcoin halving, the price had a higher increase first, then the pressure was released, and the callback began when the halving was approaching. The difference is that the market before the halving was more cruel.

Based on this background, before the second halving, the community's views on the future currency price were diametrically opposed. Foreign communities believe that halving mining rewards will have a negative impact on currency prices. "Most bitcoin users believe that halving the mining reward will negatively affect the value of this cryptocurrency. They generally believe that whether it is a large mining company or an individual miner, the bitcoin mining industry is no longer lucrative and individual The mining union is under more pressure. "

Archaeological article: https://www.8btc.com/article/90852

The domestic community believes that halving production will undoubtedly increase the price of Bitcoin. The reason is: "Whenever Bitcoin production is halved, the value of Bitcoin will increase. The premise is that other conditions remain unchanged. Demand has continued to increase in the past five years, and there is no demand for Bitcoin after halving. The reason will drop significantly. "

Archaeological article: https://www.8btc.com/article/95183

Judging from the historical results, both analyses are correct. The pressure from miners did indeed cause the short-term decline in bitcoin prices after halving, and the benefits of reduced bitcoin production showed in the medium and long term.

2. Halving will not cause a huge drop in the computing power of the entire network

Although the halving directly affects miners, before the second round of halving, the mainstream view of the mining circle believed that "halving will not cause a decline in the computing power of the entire network", based on the following three arguments: (1) and other investments The difference is that bitcoin miners know exactly what is going to happen on the bitcoin network, and miners have been preparing for halving for a long time. (2) Although miners have lost half of the bitcoin subsidies, compared with the last half of the price of the currency, the value of the currency is sufficient to offset the loss caused by the half. (3) As long as the cost is low enough, even if the profit declines, the miners are still profitable, so they will not choose to shut down.

Archaeological article: https://www.8btc.com/article/93045 https://www.8btc.com/article/96964

With the exception of the old and obsolete mining machines that have been eliminated naturally, the fundamentals of the mining circle have not changed fundamentally. The replacement of mining machines has never been new. At the beginning of 2015, the miners still used 28nm chips, such as Bitmain's Antminer S3, which provided about 450GH / s of computing power per device. After the last round of halving, the mainstream mining machine is Ant S9, each of which can provide 14TH / s of computing power. Today, S9 has been reduced to obsolete models.

Judging from the results, half an hour before the second halving occurred, the price and computing power of Bitcoin dropped by only 5%, and then gradually returned to normal. Now, miners have more financial hedging methods to release the pressure peak. The only thing to be concerned about is that when BCH, BSV and BTC are halved one after another, the computing power is switched back and forth between them. We will give an analysis of this part in Section 3.

3. Halving will not change the security of the Bitcoin network

After halving, the computing power of the entire network may decline slightly, but in the long run, the effect of halving is minimal. The most important thing is that even if the computing power drops, the security of the Bitcoin network will not be compromised.

"For bitcoin users, the halving of bitcoin has very little change for them. The reduction in block rewards does not have a huge impact on the bitcoin network or protocol. Therefore, users do not need to do anything to ensure This historical moment shares responsibilities. "Interestingly, this passage stems from a draft of Babbitt's backstage. The title of the article is" Bitcoin halving is coming, what should we do? " ", The author finally found that the user actually didn't need to do anything, so he did not publish this article …

Therefore, for users of the non-miner's crypto community, the halving may only be a "festival", which is a technical concrete presentation of the gold attribute of digital currencies. Click the link below to see how Xu Mingxing, the founder of OKCoin, expressed this view.

Archaeological article: https://www.8btc.com/article/96116

35 days of forked currency crisis

In summary, halving is nothing special in itself. But if this round is special, it will undoubtedly be a historical moment when more than three Bitcoin forks will be halved in succession this year. BCH will be the first to bear the halving on April 8th, BSV is expected to follow on April 10th, and Bitcoin will halve in 37 days, in mid-May. In addition to this, there is a fork coin BTG, but because it is no longer in the community's attention, we will not waste pen and ink.

In the short term: what will happen to the switching trajectory of computing power among these three currencies after BCH, BSV, and BTC have been halved in succession? In the medium and long term, will the fundamentals and competitive landscape of the three currencies change after the halving? In response to these two questions, the author interviewed the views of KOL in BTC, BCH and BSV communities.

On the problem of switching the computing power in half

"Hashing power will first flow from BCH to BSV and BTC. One day later, the computing power of BSV will also flow to BTC. More than a month later, BTC will be halved, and the computing power will return to BCH and BSV to achieve a new balance." Yue said: "The most worthy of attention is that some halved, and some have not halved, there may be many interesting things in between." The author believes that the so-called "interesting things" may be explained below The security risk of forked coins is related to the small actions behind the mining pool.

"BCH's computing power will be lost in the short term, but due to the advantage of BCH's dynamic difficulty adjustment, it will quickly reduce the difficulty and will not affect too much. BTC will accumulate too much computing power, resulting in increased difficulty, and extreme cases may not be reduced. The BTC income is not even as good as the BCH after halving. BTC will lose its computing power after halving. The obvious direction is the less difficult BCH, and the difficulty of BTC is adjusted for up to a week, and block congestion caused by this week will be especially Obviously. "Wanghongli of BCH.Club said. He believes that the key point of BCH's competition lies in BCH's DAA difficulty adjustment mechanism. Although it is not perfect, it has the ability to alleviate the loss of computing power and impact. He also ridiculed: "BSV claims to return to the 0.1 version of BSV, but did not delete the DAA."

Qiu Shaoxian, the owner of the BSV Skeleton Association, did not directly respond to related questions, but the article he referred to the author repeatedly mentioned the currency standard: "I try to avoid introducing the discussion of currency prices. If the mining machine and electricity fees are priced and paid in bitcoin , Miners can realize the self-production and sales of coins without having to exchange with fiat currencies. "And" When the revenue of one of the chains plummets, some miners will dig the chain with greater potential gains or be forced to shut down or even sell, further Increasing the fluctuation of computing power. At this time, how many miners would like to use the currency as the standard like Satoshi Nakamoto's, and dig silently for a year? "

About the safety issue after halving

The fundamentals of BTC have not changed, but "BSV may be more dangerous after halving, because there is no irreversible mechanism of 10 blocks." F2Pool & Cobo founder Shenyu said, but because BSV is relatively weak, it will not There are many excess returns, so from the perspective of the risk-benefit ratio, it is not necessarily attacked. If you don't consider economic reasons, the halving is a time for a good technical attack.

Although BCH does not have an irreversible mechanism of 10 blocks, it adds a rolling checkpoint mechanism. In addition, Shenyu also observed that BCH may have taken some defensive measures. For example, Bitmain recently tried to monopolize the overclocking firmware of mining machines to attract computing power to its mining pools, perhaps in response to special circumstances.

The supporters of BSV obviously do not recognize this matter. "When the block reward gradually decreases, transaction fees will become the main source of revenue for miners. If there is not enough transaction fees in the system, the income of miners will continue to decline. This means that miners will rely more on transaction procedures Fees and transaction volume, otherwise miners will not be able to leave with enough rewards after halving, and the security of the bitcoin network will no longer exist. "Said Qiu Shaoxian, owner of the BSV skeleton society.

It should be noted that the security issues discussed in BTC and BCH are based on the present, but the long-term security issues raised by BSV cannot be compared.

Conclusion

According to F2Pool data, the current BTC hashrate is 108.78EH / s, the BCH hashrate is 3540.03PH / s, and the BSV hashrate is 2266.49PH / s. The combined computing power of BCH and BSV is only 5% of the total computing power of BTC. That is to say, the impact of the computing power of both on BTC is minimal. BTC is fully capable of carrying this computing power before it is halved. So from tomorrow to mid-May, as long as the prices of these two currencies do not rise sharply, miners who are rational economists will likely escape. The direct consequence of the sudden drop in computing power is that the security of BCH and BSV will face severe challenges. At this time, it can also be seen how many "believers" are willing to stay behind …

After the halving of BTC is completed, in addition to the 5% of the computing power, I am afraid that it is difficult to suck the original computing power of BTC. Shenyu told the author: "Every switch is costly, mainly at the network level and the stability of the mining machine. And the premise of the switch is good liquidity and high mining efficiency. If the node is easy to hang up, it is not cost-effective. Now. "

Forked coins have been coexisting for so long that we habitually think that this is the norm. Will halving change this pattern?

"A lot of forked coins will die, or they will linger." Shenyu said.

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