All the talk and excitement in the mining and cryptocurrency space for the last 18 months or so has been around the Bitcoin halving. That is to say the Bitcoin halving that is set to take place in May when the original Bitcoin is set to cut its mining reward by 50 percent.
However, there is another Bitcoin mining reward that will be happening this year, and it will be happening next week on the 8th of April as Bitcoin Cash gets ready for its first ever Bitcoin halving. This event has not caught the same attention as the BTC halving, and the Covid-19 induced market fall has also taken the lustre off any potential spike in value ahead of this event.
So far, roughly 87.4% of the 21 million BCH available are in circulation and there’s around 18,366,500 BCH at the time of publication. Every four years, the BCH network sees a reward halving as the system’s rules are meant to make the issuance rate harder.
Typically, there’s about 1,800 BCH mined per day, which gives the chain an inflation rate of 3.6 percent. Bitcoin Cash miners finding a block on the BCH network today get approximately 12.5 BCH, but after the halving, they will only get 6.25 coins, the same as BTC miners will get in May.
Change in inflation
While the Bitcoin Cash halving is a very different event to the Bitcoin one, it is still interesting to dissect it and determine what it will mean for that blockchain, and if there are any similarities that can be drawn.
One thing that is sure is that the Bitcoin Cash network’s drop in issuance will change the inflation rate to an estimated 1.8 percent per annum, which will be set and in stark contrast to the inflation rate in the traditional economy.
Central banks, like the Federal Reserve in the USA, claim to keep the inflation rate at 2 percent, but reports note that the real US rate could be as high as 10% as money printing has reached a climax. No one knows how bad the inflation rate will get now that central banks worldwide have started creating trillions in fiat currencies from printing.
Breaking down what’s left
Miners have about 8,500 coins left to mine on the BCH blockchain and there are about 680 blocks left until the halving. BCH difficulty is around 486,638,039,618. What is interesting is that the mining profitability between BTC and BCH has been less volatile lately. It is currently about 1.6 percent more profitable to mine the BTC blockchain and BTC miners face a halving in 39 days.
