In May of 2020, bitcoin will see its next halving: the reduction of the reward for successfully mining a block. The Nakamoto[1] white paper specifies that every 210,000 blocks, the reward for successfully mining a block is cut by half. But while these occur roughly every four years (with the estimated reward dropping to one Satoshi on or around the year 2140), the Bitcoin Halvening of 2020[2] is particularly momentous.
At present, the reward for mining a block is 12.5 BTC; in May, the reward for successfully adding a block to the blockchain will drop to 6.25 BTC per block. The current annualized rate of “inflation” (some disambiguation regarding this later) is between 3.7 percent and 3.8 percent: An average of 144 blocks mined per day at 12.5 BTC each, yielding approximately 1,800 new BTC each day.
(A quick point of disambiguation: To describe the expansion in size of bitcoin’s outstanding number of coins as inflation — what might be called the “float” in equities or the “money stock” in more conventional currencies — is consistent with an older definition. Today, the term inflation is used to describe, and assumed to mean, an increase in general price levels within an economy. In fact, from the perspective that with increasing value one bitcoin buys more over time, it is indisputably deflationary.)
What’s noteworthy about this point is that, upon this particular halving, Bitcoin “inflating” at a roughly 1.8 percent rate annually will nominally — and by then, quite possibly in real terms — be “inflating” at a rate lower than both the Federal Reserve target of 2 percent per year and current, CPI-based estimates of real U.S. inflation of 1.9 percent annually.
