Now that the Bitcoin halving is behind us, the time has come to look towards the future once again. As was to be expected, this milestone event had no impact on the Bitcoin price whatsoever. Trading volume remains quite across most exchanges, and it looks like the experts were right in their short-term predictions.
Some cryptocurrency enthusiasts assumed there would be a significant Bitcoin selloff by miners who want to get every last bit of money from their earnings. While it is true there was a fair amount of sell pressure across the exchanges last night; things have quieted down ever since. Moreover, the Bitcoin price didn’t buckle, showing we all survived the halving without a scratch.
Bitcoin Halving Is Successful
Various Bitcoin industry experts were confident there would be no short-term changes coming to the Bitcoin price. For the Bitcoin startups who received [part of] funding in Bitcoin, this somewhat stable price point is positive news as well. Although some people may be disappointed, there were no major price swings; those may still occur in the future.
Bitcoin is a free market, and it is impossible to predict how the situation will evolve. A lot of traders use fancy tools to share their ideas, and they are right in a lot of cases. At the same time, this begs the question if people are responding to the traders’ predictions or the other way around.
Coinsource CEO Sheffield Clark sees the situation as follows:
“On Jul 5, 2016, price of $670, net dollar value of bitcoin mined per day post-halving is $1.206 million. On July 5, 2015, price of $277, net dollar value of bitcoin mined per day pre-halving was $0.997 million. Ultimately, miners have already been through and are therefore prepared for these sorts of revenue fluctuations. This means I don’t believe it will have much of an impact on miners, regardless of which direction price moves.”
He raises an interesting point in saying how miners “prepared’ for this Bitcoin halving. The majority of smart Bitcoin miners has taken precautions to this reduced block reward. That being said, it will be interesting to see how the Bitcoin mining situation evolves over time.
No Impact On Mining So Far
So far, there seems to be no immediate impact yet. The overall network hashrate has remained steady and even gone up slightly in the past few days. At the same time, the time to find blocks on the network continues to decrease, showing a healthy interest in the mining space.
An interesting turning point could be reached in roughly eight days from now. At that time, there will be a new Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment. By the look of things, the mining difficulty will go up again, making it slightly harder to find network blocks. Then again, it is not a drastic change either, and it may have no impact whatsoever.