Fork Block Rewards Halved, Barely Anyone Noticed

The halving that matters is a little over a month away. Sometime in mid-May, Bitcoin block rewards paid to miners for discovering new blocks will drop from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC.

This week, Bitcoin Cash (BCH, formerly known as BCHABC) and Bitcoin SV (BSV, formerly known as BCHSV) went through their first halving events.

They both enjoyed momentary bumps in price, by about 11 and 19% respectively. Those gains were fairly immediately wiped out, however, with their reward halvings failing to have a lasting price impact.

In fact, the ABC halving resulted in a dramatic exodus of miners. Block 630,000 triggered the reward halving to 6.25 BCH on Wednesday. It took two hours for block 630,001 to be mined. The speed of BCH is 116 transactions per second. That fell to 1.11 TPS.

The slump in network activity was predicted by Coin Metrics:

“When Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV halve their block rewards, this should force miners to direct even more hash power to Bitcoin as it will still have a 12.5 native unit block reward (instead of 6.25) for about a month longer.”

And Where Was The Fanfare?

Debates around the forthcoming Bitcoin halving and its impact on miners, price, hash rate, and network stability have raged for well over a year. Speculation among analysts, journalists, pundits, and investor groups as to what the impact will be has continued to drive column inches. Whales have started to accumulate in the run-up to the event.

Yet the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV fork halvings didn’t capture the public imagination.

In fact, as they approached, Bitcoin halving media coverage remained strong and interest on Twitter actually rose…