Who knew that when Satoshi Nakamoto was mining 50 bitcoins per block, he was also mining 50% of all coins to be issued during what was meant to be four years, but turned out to be three years because hashrate increased quickly.
Likewise for the following four years after 2012, 25% of all coins was distributed while miners were receiving 25 bitcoins per block.
Now more than a decade on, only 6.25% are to be distributed over the next four years through miners receiving 6.25 bitcoins per block.
Symmetry is beauty the ancients said, and here we have both. What’s more, it is also the case that only 6.25% of the total supply will be issued during bitcoin’s entire lifetime after this halving period ends. Someone did the maths:
“For Bitcoin: BRo=50, NB=210,000 (number of blocks in a reward period)
Total number of coins (NC):
NC=
BRo x NB + BRo/2 x NB + BRo/4 x NB + BRo/8 x NB + … =
BRo x NB x (1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …) =
BRo x NB x sum(n=0:inf) 1/2n =
BRo x NB x 2
For Bitcoin this is 50 x 210,000 x 2 = 21,000,000
The number of coins that are added during reward period m=0,1,2,… is BRo x 1/2m x NB, so:
Percentage Change (m=0,1,2,…) =
100 x ( BRo x 1/2m ) x NB / NC =
100 x ( BRo x 1/2m ) x NB / (BRo x NB x 2) =
100 x ( BRo x 1/2m ) / (2 x BRo)
and for this to be equal to ( BRo x 1/2m )%, we need BRo=50 (to cancel the 100) or the halving of 100 (percent). The number of blocks in a reward period is still a free parameter.”
Yeah, we have no clue what he said either, but apparently this symetrical beauty applies only if the initial block reward is 50%.
Then maths does its thing, with Nakamoto clearly a mathematician and an economist and a coder and smart enough to know how to get the word out and smart enough to know how to bootstrap bitcoin.
Or it was all luck, but we prefer the unknown genius narrative as it’s difficult to imagine where he would get 1,000 monkeys to Shakespeare typewriter.
