This weekend past, the mining rate of new bitcoins halved. For those that aren’t familiar, bitcoin ‘miners’ receive rewards for processing transactions. And in the anti-inflation, anti-increasing-the-money-supply spirit of Bitcoin, the code makes it progressively harder for miners to earn bitcoins as time goes on. It does this by periodically halving the reward available – and this weekend was one of those times.

Bitcoin Magazine has released an infographic to show how things have changed since the last time Bitcoin halved. Here it is:

Looking at the bitcoin exchange rate over time, you’ll notice that the halving event has come during a time of relative stability for the Bitcoin-USD exchange rate – and made almost no difference at all.

Which is a bit crazy – because we’re talking about a fairly significant milestone. It’s almost the equivalent of Brexit making no impact on the pound.

But then again, the entire Bitcoin situation is bizarre. It’s clear, even from the infographic above, that the Bitcoin infrastructure is hitting its maximum block capacity. It’s also clear that the mining network is shrinking (the number of visible nodes appears to have halved since the last halving event). Those things might sound like technical details – but basically, the Bitcoin network is busily rendering itself unusable, while at the same time, completely undermining itself by disconnecting from its free market roots.

For more on that, this post: “Bitcoin – has it failed?”

Rolling Alpha posts about finance, economics, and sometimes stuff that is only quite loosely related. Follow me on Twitter @RollingAlpha, or like my page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rollingalpha. Or both.