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"Although Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper does not explicitly describe Bitcoin halving and the digital currency's supply limit of 21 million, it still implies certain mechanisms to control the creation of new BTC.
The whitepaper states: ""To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases.""
While some essential details related to halving are not mentioned in the Bitcoin whitepaper, there are descriptions in the Bitcoin source code. Specific details about halving can be found in the validation.cpp file in the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository. In this file, there is a code comment explaining that miners' block rewards ""halve every 210,000 blocks, which will occur approximately every 4 years.""
The Bitcoin halving mechanism is programmed into the Bitcoin (BTC) mining algorithm to counteract inflation by maintaining scarcity. Before the first halving, miners could receive up to 50 BTC as a reward for each block. After the first halving event in 2012, this reward was reduced to 25 BTC, and it further decreased to 12.5 BTC in the second halving event in 2016. The most recent Bitcoin halving occurred in 2020, reducing the block reward from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC." |
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