Bitcoin’s Halving Is Nothing Like Quantitative Tightening

Frances Coppola, a CoinDesk columnist, is a freelance writer and speaker on banking, finance and economics. Her book “The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing,” explains how modern money creation and quantitative easing work, and advocates “helicopter money” to help economies out of recession.

On May 11, block 630,000 on the Bitcoin network was mined. The rate at which new bitcoins are produced promptly dropped from 12.5 to 6.25 approximately every 10 minutes. Many people expected this “halving” to trigger a sustained rise in bitcoin’s U.S. dollar price, as it did after previous halvings in 2013 and 2017. And indeed, bitcoin’s price is now trending upwards after an initial sharp fall immediately after the halving. So is there going to be another bitcoin bull run?

The halving has come at a time when the U.S. Federal Reserve is creating unprecedented amounts of new money through “quantitative easing.” For bitcoiners, such profligate fiat money creation only…