The Bitcoin Halving

04/17/20 • 21 min

The halving is coming up, current estimate is for May 11, give or take a few days. What sounds like a simple thing - to just pay 6.25BTC reward per block instead of 12.5 - develops quite some complexity in the ecosystem. Crypto Finance's Head of Research, Dr. Lewin Boehnke looks at previous halvings in bitcoin and altcoins, and ultimately he has come to an intriguing realisation: the current starting point before the halving is sufficiently different from any previous halving that all bets are effectively off.

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Centralisation

Decentralisation is, in some cases, a property of blockchains that is critical to the permissionless nature and, in other cases, pursued for its own merit. In many cases, especially when putting applications on top of a blockchain, some aspects of decentralisation are not required although they do not hurt the cause. Crypto Finance's Head of Research, Dr. Lewin Boehnke, tries to walk this fine line and make sense of both successful and failed cases of building centralised applications on a decentralised platform.

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Hashes

Flashback to pre-corona times in this episode, which was originally recorded in April 2018 to cover the time-less topic of hashes in general and their use in Bitcoin. In ensuring the integrity of the chain, generating addresses, linking transactions and mining. Hashes are one of only two cryptographic concepts that you need to understand to get the foundations of cryptocurrencies. The other one, signatures, we covered in a separate podcast before. Being recorded pre-corona has two implications. It is much more interactive. Remotely, the discussions don't work that well. The recording quality however is significantly worse. Don't worry, after the first minute it improves, but does not reach the level that we have over a conferencing system where each participant has a dedicated mic.