Are you stacking Sats?
Did you buy the dip? As of writing this story, there are 27,183 blocks left to mine until the next Bitcoin halving. These blocks will be mined more or less around April 2024. Thus, the fourth Bitcoin halving will reduce the amount of Bitcoin distributed to miners every 10 minutes to just 3,125 BTC.
What is sat stacking?
Within the Bitcoin community, “stacking sats” refers to buying bitcoin here and there. A sat, or Satoshi, is the smallest division of a bitcoin. A bitocoin is made up of 100 million satoshis
So far we’ve mentioned that with each “halving” fewer bitcoins are produced to feed the hungry cryptocurrency market, but how?
These Bitcoin blocks contain a huge public record of Bitcoin transactions. Each block of transactions is linked to the previous block via timestamps, creating the famous “blockchain” that was omnipresent in tech news during the 2022 bull run.
The anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, programmed the code so that for every 210,000 blocks of the Bitcoin public ledger (transaction ledger), the amount of Bitcoin allocated to miners would be cut in half. This was done to accomplish two things:
- Make the currency “deflationary”
- Increase the supply and demand of the digital asset
Driven by the economics of supply and demand, each time the supply of new bitcoins hitting the market every 10 minutes decreases, it leads to some of the largest price swings for this digital asset. When the price of Bitcoin hits highs and lows, we are said to be in a “bull market.” On the other hand, when the price of Bitcoin continues to fall, we are said to be in a “bear market”.
- The first halving took place on November 28, 2012. Miners went from 50 BTC per block reward to 25 BTC.
- The second halving took place on July 9, 2016. Miners went from 25 BTC per block reward to 12.5 BTC.
- The third halving occurred on May 11, 2020. Miners went from 12.5 BTC per block reward to 6.25 BTC.