Bitcoin users spend record $2.4M on halving

Bitcoin users shelled out an astonishing 37.7 Bitcoin (BTC) in payments worth more than $2.4 million to get their share of the fourth Bitcoin halving.

At 12:09 am UTC on April 20, Bitcoin miner ViaBTC produced the 840,000th block and initiated an automated protocol that reduced mining rewards by 50% from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block.

Block 840,000 quickly became the most sought-after digital real estate in Bitcoin history, with users paying a total of 37.67 BTC according to Bitcoin block explorer mempool.space.

Including a mining subsidy of 3.125 BTC, a total of 40.7 BTC – worth $2.6 million – was paid to Bitcoin miner ViaBTC to produce the half block.

Record-breaking payments are due to Djinn's race to halve and halve rare satoshis – much of the activity by Bitcoin Ordinals creator Casey Rodmarmore's new Runes protocol was released live at the same time as the halving.

Runes have been marketed as a more efficient way to create new tokens on the Bitcoin network compared to the BRC-20 token standard – which is based on a standard for creating Bitcoin-based tokens.

Like BRC-20s, Runes uses the Bitcoin network and pays fees in Bitcoin to generate new tokens. However, the similarity ends there. The main difference between Runes and BRC-20s is that Runes use the Unpaid Transaction Output (UTXO) model to create new tokens based on Bitcoin. According to the protocol descriptor from Rodermore, this is in contrast to the “text” label model used by Ordinals.

In a post to X on April 20, Ordinals developer Leonidas claimed that the payout on the five most recent Bitcoin blocks, which followed 840,000, exceeded the Coinbase reward.

“Runes degens single-handedly offset the miner's reward by halving it,” Leonidas wrote.

A total of $3.82 million in payments – excluding mining subsidies – was spent on the five blocks following the halving.

Related: Bitcoin Halving 2024: How To Make BTC Mining Efficient When Rewards Decline

Outside of the battle to write one of the first Runes, Bitcoin mining pools raced to capture the so-called “Awesome” Satoshi. The best satoshi is the first satoshi – the smallest Bitcoin denomination – on the half block.

On April 15, Trevor Owens, managing partner of the Bitcoin Frontier Fund, wrote that he was willing to include a bonus of between $500,000 and $1 million to “buy” the first block of Bitcoin.

Crypto X responds by halving Bitcoin

In the midst of the chaos, Hasaka, an anonymous businessman, posted a meme that summed up the broader sentiment at half the event — a brief holiday and then immediately back to business as usual.

Outspoken Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff took to X to throw some shade at Bitcoiners in the middle of the event.

“I think halving is an appropriate name for what happens as soon as Bitcoin HODLers see their net worth halve,” Schiff said.

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