Bitcoin Halving Triggers ‘Unprecedented’ Crypto ‘Chaos’ As Price Suddenly Surges

Bitcoin
BTC
has successfully completed its fourth halving supply cut—coming as one legendary billionaire predicts “rapid, cataclysmic” U.S. collapse.

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The bitcoin price has so far defied warnings that the bitcoin halving could trigger a “raging firesale,” bouncing back from under $60,000 per bitcoin this week to around $65,000.

Now, bitcoin miners and analysts are grappling with halving “chaos” which has pushed up bitcoin transaction fees to “unprecedented” levels.

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The bitcoin price has climbed following the bitcoin halving even as surging network fees cause … [+] “chaos.”

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“This year’s halving was much anticipated, as halvings usually are, but we had a bit of an incident that requires some further explanation,” bitcoin author and self-styled “bitcoin expert” Jimmy Song posted to X.

“The block subsidy decreased from 6.25 bitcoin to 3.125 bitcoin on block 840,000 as expected, but what wasn’t expected was the 37.626 bitcoin in fees that came along with it. To give some context, that’s easily the highest ratio of fees to block subsidy that bitcoin has ever had. One transaction paid nearly 8 bitcoin in fees by itself”—worth a mind-boggling $520,000.

So-called bitcoin miners secure the bitcoin network and process transactions in exchange for newly minted bitcoin and transaction fees via powerful computers that are believed to use as much electricity each year as some small countries.

Song added that the five following bitcoin blocks mined had “fees of 4.486, 6.99, 16.068, 24.008 and 29.821 bitcoin respectively,” calling them the highest fees ever and the situation “unprecedented.”

Alongside people paying top dollar to have a transaction be one of the first following the halving, bitcoin network fees have been pushed up by runes, a new bitcoin protocol from the developer behind the controversial non-fungible tokens (NFTs)-on-bitcoin ordinals, Casey Rodarmor.

The bitcoin price has climbed in the run up to the 2024 bitcoin halving.

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Runes is designed to allow fungible tokens, effectively memecoins similar to dogecoin, to be issued on the bitcoin network.

The first runes were issued on bitcoin block 840,000, “leading to the chaos we saw,” Song wrote.

Runes launching at the same time as bitcoin’s fourth halving is “thematically cool,” Rodarmor told Coindesk ahead of the bitcoin halving.

“We already frequently see blocks where the fee is greater than the block subsidy, and that will become more common over time with each halving.”

Runes is similar to the BRC-20 token standard which brought fungible tokens to bitcoin’s network, however, the protocol claims to be a more efficient implementation of token issuance.