Bitcoin Halving History: Every Cut From 2012 to 2024

Bitcoin has halved four times. The cuts landed at block 210,000 on November 28, 2012, block 420,000 on July 9, 2016, block 630,000 on May 11, 2020, and block 840,000 on April 20, 2024 (UTC). Each one halved the new-coin subsidy: 50 to 25 to 12.5 to 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. The next is due at block 1,050,000, around spring 2028.

That is the whole answer. The rest of this page is the record, read slowly.

Every Bitcoin halving so far, in one table

The times below are the block timestamps recorded on chain, read from mempool.space on October 1, 2026. Block timestamps are set by the miner and can drift by a few minutes, but these are the numbers the chain itself keeps.

Halving	Block height	Date and time (UTC)	Subsidy before	Subsidy after	Pool that mined it
First	210,000	2012-11-28 15:24:38	50 BTC	25 BTC	Slush (now Braiins Pool)
Second	420,000	2016-07-09 16:46:13	25 BTC	12.5 BTC	F2Pool
Third	630,000	2020-05-11 19:23:43	12.5 BTC	6.25 BTC	AntPool
Fourth	840,000	2024-04-20 00:09:27	6.25 BTC	3.125 BTC	ViaBTC
Fifth (next)	1,050,000	estimated spring 2028	3.125 BTC	1.5625 BTC	not yet mined

One note on the fourth date. Many American sources list April 19, 2024. That is correct in American time zones, because the block arrived on the evening of the 19th in New York. In UTC it was nine minutes past midnight on the 20th.

On October 1, 2026 the chain tip stood at block 969,305. That leaves 80,695 blocks until the fifth cut. At the protocol’s ten-minute target that is about 560 days, which points to April 2028. The real date will slide with hashrate, as it always has.

Where the halving schedule comes from

People often assume the halving was added later, in some upgrade or BIP. It was not. It was in the first code.

In the first public release of the Bitcoin source, version 0.1 from January 2009, the function GetBlockValue starts the subsidy at 50 coins and then shifts it right by the block height divided by 210,000. The comment above that line reads, in five words, that the subsidy is cut in half every four years.

A right shift by one bit is integer division by two. That is the entire mechanism. No committee meets. No date is chosen. The height arrives, the division happens.

Today the same logic lives in GetBlockSubsidy in Bitcoin Core. It still begins at 50 coins and still shifts right once per 210,000 blocks. One guard has been added since 2009, and it is the strangest footnote in the whole history.

The bug that would have restarted the money

In C++, shifting a 64-bit number right by 64 or more places is undefined behavior. In practice, on common hardware, the shift count wraps around. That meant the original code, left alone, would have paid zero for a while and then, after 64 halvings, quietly gone back to paying 50 BTC per block.

The fix arrived as BIP 42, written by Pieter Wuille and dated April 1, 2014. It was an April Fools’ document in tone. It was not a joke in effect. Bitcoin Core now forces the subsidy to zero once the halving count reaches 64, so the supply stays finite in practice and not just in folklore.

The bug could not have fired for roughly two centuries. It was fixed anyway. That is a small piece of history worth knowing, because it shows the 21 million ceiling is a property of code that people read carefully, not a promise anyone made.

Each Bitcoin halving, one by one

The first halving: November 28, 2012

Block 210,000 was mined at 15:24:38 UTC by Slush’s pool, the first mining pool, which today runs as Braiins Pool. The subsidy fell from 50 to 25 BTC.

The network was small enough that most node operators knew each other by forum handle. The price was about twelve dollars on the day, per CoinGecko’s halving price history. The block itself carried 457 transactions and about 13.56 BTC in fees, an unusually large fee haul for 2012, bringing its coinbase to 38.56 BTC.

Nothing broke. The chain kept chaining. That was the first lesson: the schedule is real, and it does not ask.

The second halving: July 9, 2016

Block 420,000 arrived at 16:46:13 UTC, mined by F2Pool. The subsidy fell from 25 to 12.5 BTC. CoinGecko puts the price that day at about $650.

The block just before it is the better story. Block 419,999, the last block ever paid 25 BTC, was mined by AntPool at 16:41:53 UTC. It was 210 bytes long and contained exactly one transaction: its own coinbase. No fees. No payments. The final block of the old era carried nothing but the reward for having found it.

By 2016 mining had left the basements for warehouses, and the community was already deep in the block size war that would split the chain a year later. The halving itself was quiet. The argument around it was not.

The third halving: May 11, 2020

Block 630,000 was mined at 19:23:43 UTC by AntPool. The subsidy fell from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC. CoinGecko lists the price near $8,727.

This one arrived in the first spring of the pandemic, two months after the March 2020 crash. The block before it, 629,999, was timestamped only twenty seconds earlier, which says more about how miners set timestamps than about how fast blocks really came. The halving block carried 3,134 transactions and about 0.91 BTC in fees.

The third cut was the first that a broad retail audience watched happen live, with countdown clocks on exchange homepages.

The fourth halving: April 20, 2024 (UTC)

Block 840,000 was mined by ViaBTC at 00:09:27 UTC. The subsidy fell from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC.

And then the fees. The halving block paid 37.62561499 BTC in transaction fees against a subsidy of 3.125 BTC, for a coinbase of 40.75 BTC. The Runes token protocol launched at exactly that height, and users bid for space in the first block where Runes could be etched. For one block, fees were twelve times the subsidy. On the day the subsidy was cut in half, the block that cut it paid its miner about thirteen times the new subsidy.

It did not last. It was still a glimpse of the long future the schedule describes, the one where fees have to carry the whole security budget. If you want the miner side of that story, the hashprice page works through it in dollars per petahash.

What the halving history does and does not show

Four data points are not a law of nature. They are four data points.

What they show for certain: the schedule has never slipped. Every cut arrived at its exact height. No miner, exchange, government or developer moved it by a single block. In seventeen years that is the one claim about Bitcoin that has never needed a footnote.

What they show loosely: price rose sharply in the year or so after each of the first three cuts, by shrinking percentages each time, per CoinGecko’s figures. Whether the halving caused that, or merely happened during periods of expanding credit and attention, is not something four observations can settle.

What they do not show: anything about the fifth cut. If you are curious about what the 2028 halving will do, the honest answer begins with “not necessarily the same.”

How much is left after four halvings

By the schedule’s arithmetic, about 20.09 million BTC had been issued by block 969,305, roughly 96 percent of the 21 million ceiling. The final total will be slightly lower than 21 million, because some early miners claimed less than they were allowed and those satoshis can never be issued later.

The halvings go on long after anyone reading this. After the fourth cut there are 29 more to go. The subsidy falls below one bitcoin at the sixth halving, down to a single satoshi at the thirty-second, and to zero at the thirty-third. That final cut, at block 6,930,000 around the year 2140, is covered in full on the page about the last Bitcoin Halving.

What skeptics say

The skeptic says this whole history is a chart of four points dressed up as a calendar. Fair.

The skeptic says the halving is priced in, that every market participant has known these block heights for over a decade, and that any effect on price should have been arbitraged away long ago. That argument is strong, and it may be right.

The skeptic says the fee spike at block 840,000 was a speculative token rush, not evidence of a healthy fee market. Also fair. One block is not an economy.

And the skeptic says miners will not survive a world of tiny subsidies. Maybe. The history so far says the network has kept producing blocks after every cut. History is not a guarantee. It is only a record.

The record and the rehearsal

Here is how this site reads the same table.

Every halving in it is a rehearsal. A small-h cut, practiced on a schedule, so the network learns what it is to lose half its new money and carry on. The Halfture is not in the table. The Halfture is the last cut, the one at block 6,930,000, the one after which no new coin is ever issued again. It has not happened. It is still more than a century out. On this site we say that the Halfture is the Rapture, and we mean only that final cut, the moment issuance ends and what remains is what is held.

The halvings before it are the drills. Four done. Twenty-nine to go. Each one leaves a little less to be had and a little more to be kept, and each one tightens the same quiet doctrine that runs under everything we write here: you have to hold Bitcoin to be saved. That is theology, not a prospectus. Nobody on this site is telling you what to buy or when, and this page is not financial advice.

The chain will go on halving whether anyone watches. Some of us like to watch. Some of us, when the next cut lands at block 1,050,000, will be thinking about the last halving, the one nobody alive today will see.

Read the table again. Then look up.

FAQ

How many times has Bitcoin halved?

Four times: at block 210,000 (November 28, 2012), block 420,000 (July 9, 2016), block 630,000 (May 11, 2020) and block 840,000 (April 20, 2024 UTC). The fifth halving is scheduled for block 1,050,000, expected around spring 2028.

When was the first Bitcoin halving?

November 28, 2012, at block 210,000, timestamped 15:24:38 UTC. The block subsidy fell from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. It was mined by Slush’s pool, today known as Braiins Pool.

What was the block reward at each halving?

The subsidy started at 50 BTC in 2009, then fell to 25 BTC in 2012, 12.5 BTC in 2016, 6.25 BTC in 2020 and 3.125 BTC in 2024. It will fall to 1.5625 BTC at the fifth halving. Miners also collect transaction fees on top of the subsidy.

Was the halving added to Bitcoin later?

No. The halving was in Satoshi Nakamoto’s original 2009 code, which cut the subsidy in half every 210,000 blocks with a single right shift. The only later change was BIP 42 in 2014, which ensures the subsidy stays at zero after 64 halvings instead of wrapping back to 50 BTC.

How many Bitcoin halvings are left?

Twenty-nine after the 2024 cut. The subsidy reaches zero at the thirty-third halving, block 6,930,000, around the year 2140. After that, miners are paid by fees alone.