The Bitcoin network is built in such a way to meet supply and demand, while also encouraging growth of the digital currency’s value. Because of this, once every couple of years, a process known as halving takes place, meant to reduce the number of bitcoin that are mined.

Halving hasn’t received much media attention, considering the fact that the last one took place when bitcoin was still at its beginning, and not many people were involved with the cryptocurrency. However, the expected date for this change to happen once again is the 11th of July 2016, less than three months away. The initial impact of the act will be to cut down by half the reward that miners receive for verifying crypto-transactions that take place on the blockchain. Basically, their wages will be cut into half- unless the value of bitcoin increases.

In case you have been following bitcoin news during the last couple of months, then chances are that you may have heard about the upcoming halving. Well, a couple of hours ago, bitcoin has just undergone its second halving event, thus marking the evolution of bitcoin through all these years.

To put things better into perspective, people who mine bitcoin are rewarded with bitcoin in return for their hard work. Well, the bitcoin protocol is coded in such a way to reduce the supply of bitcoin by half every 210,000 blocks or so, in order to maintain the need-demand laws, but also to make sure that the total number of 21 million coins will be mined over a prolonged period of time, rather than in 3-4 years or even less. Another law set in place for this purpose of the 10-minutes interval between confirmed blocks. In case the current bitcoin protocol remains unaltered in this perspective, then the last bitcoin will likely be mined in the year of 2140.

Over the last couple of weeks the bitcoin price has expressed intensified levels of volatility, given the fact that its value has increased by $2,000 within 3 days, between the 24th and 27th of October, thus reaching a value of $9,548. However, this bull-run wasn’t long-lived granted that the price has once again decreased to the $8,750 threshold at the time of writing.

This article is meant to serve as an analysis into what triggered this month’s price volatility, while also offering several short and medium-term predictions.