How The Bitcoin Protocol Actually Works
Finally, as a part of Bitcoin’s supply management system, the reward for mining a block is set to be cut in half, from 6.25 BTC per block mined after the most recent halving in May 2020 to 3.125 BTC in 2024. The current bullishness around mining, even in the face of that planned drop, says a lot about the profitability of the industry and the expectation that the original cryptocurrency will keep appreciating. It also reflects the fact that the so-called hashrate, which measures the total number of hash guesses being computed at a given time in the network, plummeted when Chinese operators were forced to shutter in 2021. In December 2021, the hashrate was about 175 quintillion hashes—or 175 exahashes—per second (EH/s). Instead, the difficulty of solving for the…