By the end of this lesson you’ll be able to read bitcoin’s supply schedule off the code, date the four halvings, say what pays miners when the subsidy runs low, and argue both sides of the energy question with figures.
Read the schedule off the code
Lesson 3 showed the miner’s reward: a subsidy of new coins plus fees. The subsidy started at 50 bitcoin a block in 2009 and halves every 210,000 blocks.
That interval is a fixed value in Bitcoin Core’s source code, and at one block every ten minutes, 210,000 blocks take about four years. That’s why the January 2009 announcement could promise the amount would be “cut in half every 4 years.”
The subsidy per block after each halving, drawn to scale. Past dates come from each block’s own timestamp. The dashed step is the fifth halving, expected around April 2028.
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