Tuga cannot read a clock and does not need one. She arrives at the kitchen at the same time every evening with an accuracy that makes me slightly uncomfortable, because she has internalised a schedule she has no ability to describe. The schedule is not a promise about the food. It's a fact about the kitchen.

Bitcoin has a feeding schedule too, and the confusion between those two things — a fact about supply and a promise about price — is responsible for a remarkable amount of bad decision-making.

1. The Mechanic, Precisely

Every block that gets mined creates new bitcoin. That amount is not a policy decision anyone can revisit; it's written into the software and enforced by every node.

Every 210,000 blocks — roughly four years — the reward halves.

• It began at 50 BTC per block in 2009.
• 25 BTC from 2012.
• 12.5 from 2016.
• 6.25 from 2020.
• 3.125 since April 2024, which is where we are now.
• Next reduction expected around 2028, to 1.5625.

That's roughly 450 new BTC entering the world per day, against a hard ceiling of 21 million that will never be raised, with something like 95% of all coins that will ever exist already mined. The last one arrives around the year 2140, at which point miners are paid entirely in fees.

This part is not a theory. It's arithmetic, and you can verify it yourself on your own node, which is the whole reason to run one.

2. Why Each One Matters Less

Here's the part the excitement tends to skip.

The halving cuts the new supply in half. But new supply is a shrinking fraction of the total float, so each halving removes a smaller and smaller share of the market's actual sell pressure.

Think of it as the difference between halving the tap while the bath fills up. Early on, the tap was most of what was in the bath. Now the bath is nearly full and the tap is a trickle. Turning the trickle down further is real — and it is a smaller event each time, mathematically, regardless of how it gets marketed.

Anyone telling you the 2028 halving will do what the 2012 halving did is describing a bath that no longer exists.

3. The Cycle Story and Its Problem

The four-year cycle narrative is the most popular framework in this asset class and it deserves the honest treatment.

The case for it: a scheduled, predictable supply reduction into fixed demand should push price up, and the historical pattern has broadly rhymed — accumulation, expansion, blow-off, long winter.

The case against it:

• A sample size of three or four. You cannot establish a reliable cycle from four observations. Any statistician would laugh at the confidence with which this chart gets drawn.
• It's the most telegraphed event in finance. Everyone has known the date for over a decade. Markets price known future supply changes in advance — that's what markets do. A shock nobody is surprised by isn't much of a shock.
• Enormous confounders. Those four "cycles" also coincided with a global liquidity boom, a zero-rate era, the arrival of institutional access products, and a rate-hiking cycle. Attributing the moves to the block subsidy alone requires ignoring nearly everything else that happened.

The honest position is that the halving is one input in a system dominated by liquidity, adoption, and macro conditions — not a scheduled money printer for holders.

4. What It Reliably Does Do

Where the halving has genuine, immediate, verifiable effects is on the mining industry — because miner revenue is cut in half overnight while their electricity bill isn't.

• Marginal miners die. Anyone whose costs sat above the new revenue line shuts off or sells inventory. This shows up as short-term selling pressure and hash-rate wobble, then recovery as efficient operators absorb the capacity.
• Fees matter more every cycle. As the subsidy shrinks toward zero, transaction fees have to carry more of the security budget. This is the genuinely open long-term question in Bitcoin, and it is far more interesting than price prediction.
• The scarcity story gets a headline. Not nothing. Attention is a real input to adoption, even if it isn't a mechanism.

Those are second-order, boring, and true — which is roughly the ratio you should expect from anything real in this market.

The Point

Tuga's internal schedule is remarkably good at one thing: knowing that the kitchen exists on a rhythm. It is completely useless at telling her whether tonight's food will be the good stuff or the cheap stuff. She shows up anyway, because showing up is the strategy.

The halving is the same shape of knowledge. It tells you something certain about issuance and nothing certain about price. Use it to understand why the supply is credible — that's a genuinely rare property in monetary history. Don't use it as a calendar for getting rich.

The halving is a fact about supply, not a promise about price. 🐾⚡

Nothing here is financial advice — I feed a cat and write about Bitcoin, which qualifies me to advise you on neither. Verify the numbers on your own node. Do your own research.