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Bitcoin’s 800,000th block mined – what’s subsequent?

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The Bitcoin (BTC) community has produced its 800,000 block since its inception in 2009, with simply 40,000 blocks left to mine earlier than the community’s subsequent mining reward halving.

The 800,000th block contained 3721 transactions at 1.64MB, with the worth of BTC buying and selling at $29,815 on July 24, as market researcher Dylan LeClair famous on Twitter:

The milestone was extensively shared throughout the social media platform on July 24, with Bitcoin proponents and business commentators highlighting the milestone as an indicator of community safety and resilience:

Bitcoin’s block top at its core is a measure of the sequential blocks of the blockchain, which comprise transactions and information which can be bundled into blocks by community miners. Block top additionally serves as a measure of a particular block in relation to the genesis block, the founding block of the community’s chain.

The metric acts as a chronological order of transactions and blocks of the community, with every new block linked to the earlier one within the chain. This assists in permitting customers to establish the order through which transactions are recorded.

Block top additionally serves as a measure of Bitcoin’s immutability. The extra blocks added to the chain, the extra computing energy shall be required to ensure that a malicious actor to try to tamper with earlier blocks.

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As beforehand explored by Cointelegraph, a 50 % assault would require an attacker to accumulate sufficient computing energy to recalculate the proof-of-work of each subsequent block of a tampered transaction-containing block.

Block top additionally serves as a measure used to take care of Bitcoin’s mining problem. Proof-of-work based mostly blockchain networks have their mining problem of mining adjusted periodically based mostly on the full computational energy of the community and the time it took to mine a sure variety of earlier blocks.

Bitcoin’s community goals to have a brand new block generated each 10 minutes. If extra hashing energy is added to the community at a given time, this is able to affect this metric and the community routinely adjusts the mining problem each two weeks to take care of equilibrium.

Bitcoin’s block top additionally dictates the quantity of Bitcoin rewarded to miners for including a brand new block to the community. Bitcoin’s protocol is designed to have block halving occasions each 4 years, or 210,000 blocks on the chain.

Supply: Nicehash

The preliminary block reward was 50 BTC again in 2009, earlier than it subsequently halved to 25 BTC, 12.5 BTC and at the moment 6.25 BTC in 2012, 2016 and 2020.

Bitcoin’s subsequent halving is earmarked to happen in April 2024, with the most recent block reward halving to three.125 BTC. Halving occasions traditionally coincide with main worth rallies for BTC and the broader cryptocurrency markets.

With lower than a 12 months to the following halving, different macro occasions have additionally arrested Bitcoin’s worth decline following its final main peak at $69,000. Analysts and commentators have speculated that the most recent Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) filings from the likes of worldwide asset managers BlackRock and Constancy point out renewed institutional curiosity in Bitcoin.

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