TL; DR
Full story
Have you ever wondered why no one can agree on the exact time when the BTC halving will occur?
At the time of writing, we have yet to see the exact same countdown on two sources (see header photo 👆).
So what’s going on?
It turns out that this is based on three elements: the block on which the next halving takes place, the current block height and the average block time.
Since the block on which the next halving takes place is a constant, this cannot be the case…
Although the block height may vary, it is always known, so the calculations must be consistent; so that’s not it either…
The only contentious point is the average block time (which sounds kind of boring, but gets more interesting the deeper you dig into it).
It is designed so that the time to mine a block should theoretically be as little as 10 minutes.
But the number of miners using computing power to mine and secure the Bitcoin blockchain is constantly changing, meaning that sometimes it can take more than 10 minutes, and sometimes less.
What most halving calculators seem to do is take the moving average block time over an arbitrary time period (e.g. the last 100, 90, or 30 days).
The result is that we get estimates that vary all over the place – and the truth is that no one will really know when the halving will occur until the very last block to be mined.
Okay, now you know. Happy Monday!
