Following BCH earlier the same week, BSV has halved the miner rewards on Friday, April 10th. For Bitcoin SV, this was the first halving as well. Halving in this network works exactly the same as in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash: it occurs every 210,000 blocks and the block mined immediately after will yield half the reward. In Bitcoin SV’s case, the rewards were cut down from 12.5BSV to 6.25BSV. To deal with potential miner escape, BSV directs transaction fees to the miners that solve the blocks, and with the unlimited block size that was introduced with Genesis update, the busier the network, the more transaction fees miners get. This way they’re incentivized to contribute to the network. The pre-halving situation is described in detail in an earlier article by our team, so let’s have a look now at how the network is doing after the event.
Short-term price response
The movement is not looking great on the first glance, but it’s still too early to say this trend will continue. The Bitcoin halving is coming in approximately a month and the most noticeable change caused by the coin’s halving historically has shown itself in the long term, three to six months after the reward slashing. At the time of writing the article, Bitcoin SV ranks sixth with $3,487,919,898 USD market capitalization, evaluated at $189.78 USD (0,02766810 BTC) (according to CoinMarketCap).
How did network respond to Halving
According to the information on bitinfocharts, on the day of halving three important metrics have tanked: hashrate, block propagation times and mining profitability. Right now, however, these numbers seem to be returning to the previous average rates. 
The hash rate did drop, but according to coin.dance at the moment of writing, it is more profitable by 3.1% to mine BSV rather than BTC. The mining profitability metric accounts for not only the price but also the block difficulty (which is lower than BTC’s) and subsidies for block creation (i.e. miner fees). 
The drop in profitability is most likely an immediate response of the metric to reward slashing. 
The network was moving almost two and a half times slower than it is supposed to (26 minutes for a block on average as opposed to the standard rate of 10 minutes). The median time to find a block right after the halving and until the end of the day was about 15 minutes. Not a serious slowdown, but a difference between the average and the median is explained by a few extremely slow blocks (for instance, block #630,016 took 116 minutes to be mined, #630,026 — 82 minutes, #630,051 — 79 minutes (all data taken from blockchair.com)). The graph shows that it is back to its usual propagation tempo, though.
Community response
Most discussion has been happening within the BSV community on Twitter. People noted how the network didn’t come to a halt like BCH and how the profitability of mining has recovered, despite the hash rate drop. Outside of it, BSV halving mostly got lumped together with last week’s BCH halving and hardly discussed.
Takeaway from the BSV Halving
All in all, the events of BSV halving mirror that of the BCH, which happened a few days earlier. Proponents of both chains agree that the full picture will become apparent after the BTC halving, for now almost all hash power is concentrated in that network (97.6%), which was expected. After that, not only the major Bitcoin forks but the market as a whole will probably see a long-lasting change, so it is almost impossible to say for sure how the events will unfold even in the following months. In any case, you can get Bitcoin SV with ChangeHero extra fast thanks to zero confirmations. Check it out while it is still calm before the storm! ChangeHero will keep you posted on other major events in crypto, the only thing you need to do is subscribe to ChangeHero Blog and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Telegram. Feel free to give us any feedback in any of these channels!
