F2Pool, the same mining pool which generated the largest bitcoin transaction ever recorded on July 11, mined the Litecoin network’s block 840,000, with a declined mining reward from 50 LTC per block to 25 per block for the first time since its launch in 2011.The Litecoin network, similar to the Bitcoin network systemized to halve its block reward every 840,000.To celebrate its technological “milestone,” the Litecoin association published a video explicating the process of the decline in mining reward.Currently, the halving of the mining reward has not affected the network significantly.According to BitcoinWisdom the Chinese Litecoin Markets have seen a substantial decline of the price, but it is slowly recovering.However, miners started to worry about the effect of such decline in the long term.The majority of them are worried that the declined block reward will affect the price and the mining profitability of Litecoins.According to the video published by the Litecoin network association, the profitability of its miners will fall by 50%, especially those who have invested in mining hardware.

Many still believe however, that the reduced supply growth could increase the price of Litecoins, and maintain the usual operations for miners.However, if the price does not increase, miners will be seeing a 50% decline in their income, making it much difficult to pay electricity / maintenance fees for their mining equipment, electricity and computers.If the network hash rate drops however, the mining difficulty could readjust itself, and make it much easier for miners to resume their operations.Because of the decrease in block reward, many Litecoin miners have canceled their orders for ASIC miners and other new mining hardware equipment.According to Bitcoin Wisdom, Litecoin is recovering from its light crash of its price on August 24 and 26, and will recover very soon.WHAT IS BITCOIN HALVING?In the Bitcoin network, user transactions are grouped in blocks and recorded to a digital public ledger called a blockchain.Miners are in charge of this task, and receive a mining reward in the form of bitcoins for each block recorded.The amount of bitcoins rewarded for each block decreases with time: it is halved every 4 years.

This event, the moment when the mining reward is divided by 2, is commonly called "Bitcoin halving".Other denominations are used: "reward drop", "reward halving", or simply "the halving" or "the Halvening" which is a popular meme among bitcoiners.When Bitcoin was created in 2009, the initial reward was 50 bitcoins.In november 2012, it dropped to 25btc after the first halving.The second halving will take place in July 2016, decreasing the reward to 12.5btc.WHAT IS THE IMPACT ON BITCOIN PRICE?As any freely traded asset, Bitcoin price depends solely on demand and supply.The evolution of bitcoins supply is hard coded and is known to everyone, so it all depends on the evolution of demand.Bitcoin being a very young currency with much room to grow in use and value, I would personally bet on a price increase.It remains 100% unpredictable.One thing is certain though: at the time of Halving, the supply reduction will already be priced in the exchange rate, thanks to market anticipation.So don't expect a big price movement on Halving Day.Note that other examples of halvings are available for comparison.The first Bitcoin halving occurred on the 28th of November 2012.

On that day the price went up +1.7%, a negligible move.However the preceding and following months showed continued growth and led to the famous early-2013 rally (from 13$ to 260$ in 4 months).More recently, the Litecoin, a Bitcoin clone, passed its first halving on August 25th, 2015.bitcoin hiloTwo months before, a wild speculative rally took the price from 2$ to more than 8$, before crashing back to 3$.What is certain for this second Bitcoin halving is that similar wild, speculative, short-term rallies and crashes will occur.ethereum notificationsThe interesting observation will be, on a larger time-scale, to see if the up-trend that Bitcoin price has been experiencing since its inception in 2009 will continue its path.bitcoin number of script verification threads

HOW DOES THIS SITE WORK?This web page is connected to several web APIs to provide real-time data about the Bitcoin network.The new block announcement is obtained through a websocket established with blockchain.info.The spot price is provided by Bitstamp web API.Oct 25, 2016 at 11:35 // Business Bitcoin  is the most popular cryptocurrency today with millions of transaction taking place every day.It is created by solving complex algorithms with sophisticated computers in an energy-intensive process termed bitcoin mining.However, there are only 21 million bitcoins that can ever mined.Many medium-scale and small-scale miners either ignore the effects of the event of the mining rewards diminishing or see that by the time it does reach zero they could have reached their  break-even point or the transaction fees will rise up enough to compensate them.Esteban Smit, Founder Member at Skill Dragon Bitcoin Mining in South Africa, said the value of bitcoin will continue growing and will become like other currencies.

“Nothing much is expected, they will be used like everything else exchanging hands all the time for goods and services like money does and like it is doing right now as well, the difference is that the bitcoin will continue growing in value.” Many questions are being asked about what it will really be like when miners no longer get rewarded.Miners spend a lot of money to buy mining computers to be able to fork out some coins fr om the block.Miners use a good percentage of these earnings to maintain their operations and to cool mining stations.The bitcoin architecture has been pre-designed to allow a halving of rewards after every four years and to allow the changing of the mining difficulty factor (normally on the upward) after every two weeks.Coupled with all this, the fight for the miners’ profit and survival becomes a tough one and miners need to survive in order to continue in business. talked to David Sønstebø - founder of IOTA, a new cryptocurrency token focused on providing an infrastructure suitable to carry out micro-transactions for the Internet-of-Things ecosystem.

He said mining fees will increase and will be used by miners to sustain their operations.“Fees will grow in accordance with a decrease of mining rewards, as the amount of bitcoin blocks being found goes down the fees paid to the miners will, as the rule of thumb, go up and act as an incentive to the miners, Assuming no radical changes in architecture occurs.” But still, no doubt a lot of miners will be forced to upgrade their mining hardware or else they will not find any new blocks.Peter Trcek, CEO of Bitnik, a BTM operator based in Slovenia, said Bitcoin’s price will rise, he explains that the trend was established in the early stages of bitcoin.“If bitcoin will be successful in the future, the price will rise.This will keep mining profitable even though absolute value of block reward will diminish.(example: 12.5 BTC in USD today is much more than 50 BTC were in 2009).When block reward falls very low or disappears it's not unreasonable to expect the computational capabilities of the network will be so much larger that the amount of transactions transacted over bitcoin will fill blocks with sufficient fees to keep mining profitable.

Besides, mining is a competition on the market for whatever is earned by block reward + fee.Even if there is less revenue to be gained, there will still be miners that will keep competing for it as long as their costs are covered.On the topic of bitcoin as a payment method.If it won't be bitcoin it will be a different cryptocurrency IMO.” David V. Duccini, the lead developer of GiveCoin and founder of the Strength in Numbers Foundation, said he agreed that transaction fees need to increase and stressed some points to the bitcoin core developers.“I agree on the need for higher fees — it should be a percentage-based model, like I used in 2GIVE — in fact it’s one of the “tells” that suggests that Satoshi was NOT an economist — the fixed fee penalizes micro-transactions while letting monster sends get off for essentially free which is also likely a lot more work for the miners to vet all the coin inputs to verify against a double spend.For the most part, Bitcoin should be used primarily as an asset and not a currency IMHO — if we had a solid wallet that facilitated a combo Bitcoin/Litecoin (for example) — we could facilitate more of the currency sends on Litecoin” Rob Gonzalez, CEO at UTXO, a company that is the seller of mined bitcoins, said bitcoin will become a generally accepted currency and its price will settle from fluctuations.

“If Bitcoin does become mainstream enough the price will settle down at whatever price the mainstream thinks bitcoin is worth.It will be a currency like USD and Euro wh ere it's not as volatile.Governments may adopt it into their currency, who knows.It's over a century away.But that's what I think” Bitcoin mining does not only involve activities that create new coins, but it’s also a way of verifying daily transaction that crowd the blockchain network.Miners validate transactions before they are finally added into the blockchain records.Mark Carrusca, Blockchain - Bitcoin Mining Project Manager at Independent Bitcoin Mining, an analyst and operator, said the incentives in terms of fees earned by miners will be enough to keep them mining.“Miners will continue to earn fees and because of a reduced supply the price of bitcoin will rise and so to the fees paid to miners thus, most miners will continue to mine bitcoins keeping the network running” However, as stated before, the possibility of all bitcoins being mined is expected to occur around the year 2140 which is still very far from now.