Leap Days’ Massive Significance on Bitcoin and Crypto Markets

As interesting as Bitcoin statistics are, one that is particularly of interest is the halving schedule. Co-incidentally, it falls in line with the leap year.

Originally, Bitcoin was launched in 2009, while only the introduction (bitcoin.org) and Whitepaper was published in 2008. However, as the design’s original four plan got deviated by about 2 months, the halving schedule now co-indices with the Leap Year.

According to the original design, the halving must occur at ever 210,000 blocks. Since, the block time is about 10 minutes, it takes about 3.99 years to reach that height. The first Bitcoin halving happened in November 2012, followed by July 2016.

Nevertheless, the variation in the total hashing power and difficulty adjustments usually keep it under 10 minutes. However, during the bull run of 2017, the block time increased due to transaction traffic. Currently, the average time to mine each block is about 9.67 minutes.