Last Block Mined Before Halving Holds an Important Message That Satoshi Would be Proud of…

A historic day for sure, May 10, 2020, where Bitcoin once again has moved in the opposite direction of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Opposing inflation by decreasing the block rewards once again by half, Bitcoin makes sure the ball is in it’s court as the world’s economic situation continues to worsen.

Let’s take a look at today’s events and what it could mean for bitcoin down the line as well as checking out the message left on the last block mined by the f2pool.

Nothing should be considered investment or financial advice. Enjoy the ride.

Bitcoin Halving

For those that do not know, Bitcoin halves the reward it produces per block confirmation every 4 years. This means that as the miners are hard at work competing to solve the algorithm first, the reward is only half as many Bitcoin as it was from the previous four years. This stays the case for the next four years until ultimately the halving hits again decreasing the rewards.

This does amazing things for the supply and demand of the economic model for Bitcoin and you can read about that here if you want.

In terms of the halving that happened most recently, there were some interesting developments.

The Last Block

In order for the halving to occur, there must be a last block mined! That just so happened to be block number 629,999. This last block was mined by a mining pool named f2pool. Luckily, they were prepared for this epic moment and left us a little message behind to commemorate the final block in memory of the Genesis block mined oh so long ago.

The final Bitcoin block with a subsidy of 12.5 BTC was mined by @f2pool_official and contained the following message in its coinbase transaction:

🐟NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescuehttps://t.co/9dtTrC8YH6

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) May 11, 2020

The message was of an article from the New York Times which reads:

“NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 with $2.3T injected, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue”

The article from the New York Times can be found here and is very much a real article published by the New York Times.

While this is epic in itself, it really encapsulates the idea behind Bitcoin. So much so that it is a spitting image of the message left on the Genesis block which reads:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks “

A clear representation can be drawn between these messages as the community continues its agenda to pursue a monetary policy and digital asset free from governmental control.

The crazy thing is 11 years later and the economy is headed right back in the same direction wince we came. Crazy to think that over time, nothing really changed to better the economic stability of the world.

Moving Into a New Era

While the prior halving lead to extremely exciting times and developments no one could have predicted, we can only speculate what the next 4 years will bring.

Most projects in the top 50 did not exist at the prior halving, and I have a feeling the same may be said in 4 years. Only the top projects will survive that put the decentralized community first, and strive to better the world in some way.

Besides the general market, Bitcoin sure is poised to propel to new highs as the supply and demand model gets squeezed more than ever before. On top of this assumption, we will probably get the first real look at how Bitcoin will preform in a downward economy.

Never before has Bitcoin had to fight its way up in a collapsing economic model, so it will actually be good to see how the asset preforms. While most investors and speculators would assume Bitcoin to preform similar to commodities, it has gone untested at scale.

Only time will tell but for me, these next four years are a time to watch the market closely and see how the digital economy holds it’s own against the world’s teetering scales.