Serial entrepreneur, advisor; investor in crypto/AI. Author, Bitcoin Supercycle. CNBC called me the Godfather of Crypto. Advisory/PR for 400+ tokens, including Ethereum & Tether. Started crypto migration to Puerto Rico.
1- Bitcoin Spring begins the day of the halving. It’s when the “seed” of an entire new cycle is planted. On this day, most bitcoin miners become temporarily unprofitable, as they typically operate at 20 percent profit margins (some are much higher, some are less; this is largely dependent upon the price of electricity per kilowatt and the “hashing power” of the bitcoin miners). At the moment of the halving, the bitcoin reward per block gets cut in half. On November 28, 2012, it went from 50 bitcoin per block to 25; three cycles later, on April 20, 2024, it went from 6.25 bitcoin to a mere 3.125 BTC per block. In the early days of Bitcoin, prior to the first halving, the majority of mining was done by individuals (known as “solo mining”), running the original mining software that came with each Bitcoin QT wallet downloaded from the bitcoin.org website. About midway through the first cycle, GPU mining took off (popularized by Laszlo Hanyecz, who famously spent 10,000 of his bitcoin to buy a pizza), increasing the difficulty levels to the point that CPU mining became ineffective. By early 2013, field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips were built to do nothing but mine bitcoin,and they were far more powerful than GPUs. This increased the difficulty to the point that “home mining” was no longer an option (at least for bitcoin) by the end of that cycle. Solo mining was replaced by industrial bitcoin mining farms, each competing for the fractions of a bitcoin that would be pro-rated by mining pools. Each new halving makes the majority of miners unprofitable until the difficulty levels adjust and/or new mining equipment arrives. Helping the profitability in the current cycle is the advent of Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes, NFT-like products built on Bitcoin that command higher fees than ordinary bitcoin transactions.