Fourth Bitcoin Halving Officially Arrives With Expectations of at Least 200 Percent Gains Within the Next 18 Months

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Bitcoin's periodic halvings are its most anticipated yet disruptive events, heralding disinflation, miner upheaval, a plunge in the network's hash rate, and expectations of rip-roaring gains in the months ahead.

Bitcoin's Fourth Halving Event

Bitcoin undergoes a halving roughly every four years when the reward for mining a block is cut in half. This time around, the halving was scheduled to occur at block number 840,000.

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As is evident from the above snippet, the halving-inducing block has now been mined. This means that the reward for mining a block on the Bitcoin blockchain has now been cut in half to just 3.125 BTC.

Concurrently, Bitcoin's hash rate has plunged as inefficient mining ASICs go offline. The network's hash rate will remain subdued until the mining difficulty adjusts downwards, thereby creating a new equilibrium.

What's Next?

In the past three halvings, Bitcoin has recorded gains of anywhere between 200 and 1,000 percent. This means that, as per historical norms, the cryptocurrency can hit a price of between $192,000 and $704,000, based on a pre-halving price of $64,000.

Bear in mind that the investment firm Bernstein sees the crypto sector's market cap rising to $7.5 trillion by the end of 2025 from a market-based capitalization of around $2.6 trillion today. Assuming that Bitcoin is able to maintain its current sector weight of 54 percent, this projection would see the price of the world's pre-eminent cryptocurrency rise to around $210,000.

Also, as per past precedents, buying Bitcoin six months before the halving event and selling it eighteen months after the fact has a pristine record of outperforming a simple "buy and hold" strategy. This means that