Explaining the bitcoin halving Today there are 19,679,792 bitcoins on issue. Tomorrow there will be 900 more. The network processes transactions on average every 10 minutes and in doing so, delivers 6.25 bitcoins per block to miners. 6.25 *6 *24 = 900 bitcoins per day. From the 20th April, that reward for miners will drop

Disappointed I somehow always feel disappointed with the performance of bitcoin. There are occasional bouts of excitement when it really charges; but mostly, I feel disappointed. I don’t know if remarking on it is even helpful but it speaks I suppose to my expectations. Thursday was therefore another miserable day languishing just below all-time highs

First tough week Last week was probably the first tough week since the ETFs launched. We experienced net selling. Some critical factors appear to be the end of the approaching quarter, which will cause some balance sheet shuffling but also the settlement of the Genesis bankruptcy. Overall, $0.8 billion in net selling in the week

Not Satoshi By its nature, bitcoin invites attack. Anyone can copy the software. Anyone can call it their own. From the very start, it was open source and intended to be so. That has had many consequences, which include many forks of bitcoin, where copied code purports to be bitcoin or some superior version of

What if? One of the better books about cryptocurrency is Cryptoeconomics by an ex US Navy pilot called Eric Voskuil. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading it unless you are really an enthusiast but it sets a very interesting tone because he has worked deeply with the US government. For example, we generally read that the

Getting high A short note on all-time highs. Bitcoin, give or take, has an all-time high price of US$69,000, which has been topped a few times intra-day this week. It first arose in November 2021. Since then we have had inflationary impulses of 4.7% in 2021, 8% in 2022 and 4.1% in 2023. As a

Dad Politics is about winning For a long time, since the beginning in fact, digital assets have had no friends in politics. Simply, it was not a vote winner. Indeed there was no need to take a position on things like bitcoin because nobody had really ever heard of it and it was ‘nonsense’ and

Groq* Off topic to start, but this really caught my attention and won’t be in the AFR for at least six months.  I insist you try groq.com. Before you do though, I will explain. Programs like GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini use enormous amounts of computing power. That is why you access them via the web

New Zealand I had no idea who New Zealand’s Reserve Bank Governor was until this week. In a discussion with a parliamentary committee he had this to say about the actions of the Central Bank: “We actually fund ourselves and work out what dividend to pay. It’s a great business to be in Central Banking,

Sideshow Enter the AFR Economics editor. The article makes the case that the legitimisation of bitcoin through the ETFs essentially blesses the use of digital assets. This will usher in an era of government issued central bank digital currencies which people will naturally prefer to bitcoin. Unbacked cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are one, but they