In case you didn't know today is the day that bitcoin "halves!" In a tweet earlier I mentioned it's the day that satoshi gets half your bitcoin, but I've been corrected. It's actually the day that the inflation rate of bitcoin halves. Today there's 1800 bitcoin that are sold into the market by miners every day. Starting later today there's only going to be 900. That's because the amount of new bitcoin issued by the chain is halved.
Although, as Adaptive Capital manager Willy Woo points out that's not the only source of sell pressure. Starting today the largest sell pressure will be coming from exchanges. That's right, all those micro transactions add up. They're currently putting out about 1200 bitcoin per day. There's also the plus token scam that should be ended around now too. So the total picture looks something like:
This past month
plus token 500/day
exchanges 1200/day
infation 1800/day
Going forward
exchanges 1200/day
inflation 900/day
so, while it is a halving from the perspective inflation it's more like a 40%-ing from the perspective of sell pressure on bitcoin.
What's that mean for alts?
No one knows for sure, but the two leading theories are it will go up or down. The maximalists that think altcoins go down beleive that shitcoins have no value and there's no reason to hold them, anything that could add value will eventually just be added to bitcoin and so all these tokens are stupid to hold. A moderate like Willy Woo will say some of them regardless of actual utitliy have enough of a network effect where they orbit bitcoin and go up and down at their own schedule but appear to always hang onto bitcoin while others simply die. Lastly, the shitcoiners believe that $100k bitcoin will make the alts look super cheap, and greed + technical innovation will lead prices up.
Which way will these things go? who knows, but starting today the bitcoin blockchain will mint 900 fewer bitcoin per day and it only goes down from there.