I have had a few questions about protecting bitcoin in a hard fork from friends and colleagues recently. I have also read people asking this question in various bitcoin forums throughout the internet and while I have seen a lot of good advice out there, I have also seen some terrible advice.

Protecting your bitcoin has come to a head recently with a new bitcoin fork about to happen at block 494,784. I will try to spare you my opinion as to what fork is ‘right or wrong’ or any of the politics involved, I will just tell you how to protect your bitcoin by splitting them, as safely as possible, if that is what you chose to do.

I mostly want to help you understand how and why this method of spiting works so you can make the best-informed decision you can. My hope is that if you have already decided to split your coins I can point you to a method that is (relatively) safe and easy to follow so you don't end up being forked.

A few years back after the last halving I wrote an article shortly after the first halving block 210,000 was mined dropping the subsidy from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. Since block 420,000 was just mined reducing the subsidy from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC I thought it would be an appropriate time to write a follow-up article with similar data for the most recent halving block comparing it to the previous one.

CAmount GetBlockSubsidy(int nHeight, const Consensus::Params& consensusParams)
{
    int halvings = nHeight / consensusParams.nSubsidyHalvingInterval;
    // Force block reward to zero when right shift is undefined.
    if (halvings >= 64)
        return 0;

    CAmount nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;
    // Subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks which will occur approximately every 4 years.
    nSubsidy >>= halvings;
    return nSubsidy;
}

Simple right?

In just a few days we will have the second bitcoin halving event. Often in bitcoin we forget that not everyone is elbow deep in code all day, not everyone has been 'with us' for years and while we may talk about things like 'The Halving' we probably don't do the best job at explaining exactly what it is, why it is, what happened last time and what might happen this time.

As the graph below from BitcoinWisdom shows for the first time since just before ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) started to work on the bitcoin network it is possible that we may see a decrease in the difficulty of the bitcoin network. (This just in, it is official, the difficulty decreased to 40,007,470,271 a change of just under a percent. It may take some time for your client to adjust and the number to stabilise)

In a continuation of today's earlier news that Satoshi's email account has been compromised it now seems that the perpetrator has used the email account to compromise other Satoshi accounts.

First, Satoshi's P2P Foundationaccount posted a message warning Satoshi that some of his information was being sold on the …

Satoshi Nakamoto, much revered and currently missing inventor of bitcoin seems to have had his email address compromised by an unknown agent.

You may or not remember, Satoshi exclusively used one email address when he was active in the bitcoin community, [email protected]. If you have a look at …

New Zealand bitcoin exchange site bitnz.com has been taken by the administrator leaving the message "bitnz.com under maintenance. Apologies for the inconvenience (contact(at)bitnz.com).".

It seems that last monday at 3am New Zealand time 39 bitcoins were transferred from the exchange by an unknown party.

Bitnz …

It is in truth a minor milestone but for those who like "large whole numbers" block 310001 has just been mined by Ghash.IO pushing the total amount of bitcoin to 13,000,000.

That means that there only another 8 million to be mined over the next 140 years …

We have been waiting and here it is, the 29,658.80112195 Confiscated FBI Coins held in 1Ez69SnzzmePmZX3WpEzMKTrcBF2gpNQ55 have started their move.

It is not into the eventual 30,000 BTC blocks from the auction yet but I will keep an eye on them and update this post as it …

We did not expect the US Marshals Service to release information about the auction of Silk Road bitcoin last week but in the absence of information speculation both on the markets and on the internet is building.

First Barry Silbert, Founder of SecondMarket and BitcoinTrust has tweeted that they were …