Bitcoin SV’s First Halving Crimps Profits for BSV Miners

Bitcoin SV, the network that split off from the Bitcoin Cash blockchain in late 2018, has cut its miners’ block reward in half for the first time.

Miners on the network produced the 630,000th block around 00:50 UTC time on Friday, which, by design, triggered the halving event that reduced mining rewards from 12.5 BSV to 6.25 per block.

BSV is now trading at $214 as of press time, for a market capitalization of $3.9 billion, making the network the market’s sixth largest cryptocurrency. It’s down 5.4 percent over the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk’s price index.

The halving means the daily output for newly mined BSV is now around 900 units, which, at BSV’s current price, means the pie of block rewards miners can compete over totals about $200,000 a day.

The total computing power racing on Bitcoin SV has declined by some 25 percent since a recent high around four exahashes per second (EH/s) in early February, following BSV’s price plunge from $370 to $110 within a month. The price had bounced back to over $200 over the past several weeks.

The halving event came just a day after the same milestone for Bitcoin Cash, which broke off the Bitcoin network following a heated community disagreement in 2017. Miners on the Bitcoin SV network may face the same profitability issue as those on Bitcoin Cash.

Following Bitcoin Cash’s halving Wednesday, the hashing power on the network has dropped from around 3.5 EH/s to 2.5 EH/s. It took miners about 100 minutes to mine the first block after the Wednesday halving, while the average block production time is designed to be 10 minutes.

This week marked the first halvings for the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV networks since their births in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap with currently 105 EH/s of computing power, is around 35 days away from its programmed halving, which will be the third in its history and one of the most anticipated events of 2020.