I built a twitter bot called @BitcoinProgress [https://twitter.com/BitcoinProgress] with the primary intention of educating users about the quadrennial subsidy halving event. If you're interested in learning about the halvening event, give the bot a follow and check out Andreas Antonopolous' bitcoin book chapter 10 on "Mining and Consensus" on GitHub:
Basically, the supply and creation of new bitcoins are controlled via a few simple mechanisms. The basics of how bitcoin is created as follows:
The first mechanism is the distribution of Bitcoin to miners:
Bitcoin miners compete to find a nonce value that falls below a certain target. When a miner finds a valid nonce that, upon being hashed, results in a number lower than the target - they are subsidized for their work in both transaction fees and new Bitcoin. The initial subsidy started at 50 BTC.
The second mechanism controls the pace that new Bitcoin is created:
Finding the nonce should take roughly 10 minutes on average in order to control the pace at which new bitcoin enters the market. The network makes difficult adjustments every 2016 blocks to regulate block time.
The third and final mechanism controls the quantity of Bitcoin that is generated over time:
The block subsidy is halved every 210,000 blocks or roughly every 4 years until the subsidy reaches 1 satoshi at which point it cannot be halved any further and the block subsidy ends. This halving cycle will repeat a total of 33 times.
If you found this interesting, then follow https://twitter.com/BitcoinProgress to track the halvening!
If you are interesting in viewing the code you can check it out here:
https://github.com/deevolutionism/bitcoin-halving-progress-bar
The bot currently runs on an AWS lambda instance.
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