When we watch the BTC halving, what are we watching?

Editor’s note: This article comes from Orange Book (ID: chengpishu).

In a few hours, the Bitcoin halving will officially arrive.

I saw many friends on WeChat start to create groups, ready to watch this moment together. This feeling is quite strange. In addition to the countdown on New Year's Eve, another scene that reminded me of was when mobile Internet was still very popular a few years ago. Every time Apple held a press conference, everyone would stay up late to watch new products together. That was also a very important moment for an industry.

I think this has nothing to do with the impact of halving on Bitcoin prices, which is the "halving market" that many people are looking forward to. What really makes people willing to stay in front of their computers in the early hours of the morning is not the price of the currency. The information of halving was released to the previous price a long time ago. In other words, the market has already priced in. The price at the specific moment of halving does not have much meaning. Judging from historical data, the price at this moment will not change much.

So what is the motivation for Bitcoin to keep these people in front of their computers and count down? Starting from the international tensions caused by the Sino-US trade war in 2019, people said that the next decade would be the worst, and then in 2020, a global virus disaster almost changed the life trajectory of everyone in the world. The world has indeed become worse, with financial crises, real economic difficulties, and rising unemployment rates.

While so many things and changes are happening around us, Bitcoin is still producing blocks every ten minutes as designed in the original code, working diligently and step by step, without any changes. With one block after another, it finally accumulated 210,000 blocks, and then ushered in the third halving moment.

In a complex and ever-changing era, Bitcoin is like a simple, old, but punctual pendulum clock. It runs silently at its own pace, no matter how much the outside world changes.

This certainty of Bitcoin has become a SoV in the financial sense of fighting against fiat currency inflation, and it also seems to have become a timekeeping tool in another sense. I remember an article I read a long time ago, Blockchain Proof-of-Work is a Decentralized Clock (PoW is essentially a decentralized clock). Bitcoin uses a hash function to give each block a unique timestamp. If I turn on my computer tonight and quietly watch the halving, then I should also be in this mood, witnessing a special timestamp that I have experienced in a certain period of my life.