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.

The chatter is a buzz in the bitcion community,  the 210,000th bitcoin block has been mined, there are now 10,499,925 bitcoins and the reward miners receive from solving a block has dropped from 50 to 25 bitcoins.  At precisely 2012-11-28 15:24:55 UTC a miner called …

According to the Bitcoin Clock it is estimated that in less than 12 hours the bitcoin block count will reach 210,000 and mining reward will half from 50 bitcoins to 25 as was discussed in a earlier post.

I say estimated because the rate that blocks are solved, while …