Bitcoin Halving To Take Place In April 2019? The Recent Hash Rate Acceleration Suggests

Bitcoin’s halving, one of the most highly-anticipated events within the entire cryptocurrency community, is currently scheduled to take place on May 16th. However, some are already suggesting that the date could move closer to as soon as April 2020 because of the rapid acceleration in the network’s hash rate.

Bitcoin’s Hash Rate Accelerates Quickly

In order to understand the importance of Bitcoin’s hash rate, it’s important to explain how does mining work.

When someone has a Bitcoin wallet and he wants to send some BTC from his wallet’s address to another one, he has to create a transaction and sign it with his private and public key and broadcast the transaction on the Bitcoin network. The goal is to add this new transaction to one of the next blocks which will be added to the blockchain.

The job of miners is to pick up those transactions and put them into a list that makes up every single block. During this process, the miners also need to verify each transaction in order to prevent double-spending.

In order to broadcast the transaction to the network, the miner has to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number, known as a nonce. It will have unique mathematical characteristics when calculating a particular function which is called a has function. The catch is, however, that the only way to find this nonce number is to guess.

Here’s where the hash rate comes into play. The number of “guesses” that a computer produces per second is known as the hash rate. Hence, the higher the hash rate of your machine, the higher the chance of you adding this block to the network and receiving the respective block reward.

Now, we can see that the network’s hash rate has increased substantially throughout 2019. On January 1st, it was around 41 quintillion hashes per second. Yesterday, on September 10th, it was 97.5 quintillion hashes per second which represents an increase of about 130%.

Bitcoin Hashrate. Source: Blockchain.com

Can Bitcoin Halving Come Sooner?

Now, back to Bitcoin’s halving. It’s supposed to take place whenever 210,000 blocks are added to the blockchain. But as we explained above, the higher the hash rate is, the quicker the network is seeing new blocks being added.

The rapid acceleration in Bitcoin’s hash rate has already caused some prominent members of the crypto community to believe that the halving won’t take place in May, but rather in April. Among them is popular Bitcoin proponent hodlnaut, known for starting the famous Lightning Torch initiative.