After a few days of consolidating around $46,000, Bitcoin price dipped below $45,000. Most altcoins similarly drop in price, with a few exceptions. LUNA is among them as it gets a double-digit pump to hit a new ATH above $40.
BTC/USD 4-hour chart | Source: TradingView
Bitcoin price slides below $45,000
Bitcoin has had a rough week. As it was preparing to become a legal tender in El Salvador, its price went to a multi-month high at just over $53,000. However, shortly after it became official, BTC plummeted in value.
In just a matter of hours, it lost over $10,000 and bottomed at $43,000. It bounced off somewhat rapidly to $46,000 and even challenged $47,000 a day later, but it ultimately failed to continue higher. Just the opposite, the bears pushed it south once more in the past 24 hours, and it dipped to just over $44,000. As of now, it has recovered several thousand dollars but still struggles below $45,000.
However, there is another good news the largest cryptocurrency recorded its 700,000th block on September 11.
Block 700,000 | Source: Clark Moody, analyst cum Bitcoin enthusiastic
At this point, 89.58% of its total supply has already been issued. The total number of coins in circulation currently stands at 18.812 million. Reportedly, it took BTC 693 days to reach another significant milestone after recording 600,000 blocks on October 19, 2019.
At the time, the Bitcoin price closed at $7,960 on the Bitstamp exchange. At press time, the cryptocurrency is trading at $44,835, up 463% from the day the 600,000th block was recorded.
New blocks are generated about every 10 minutes on average, but it’s impossible to predict exactly how long it will take to generate a block. When the mining difficulty is too high, block production can become significantly slower. It took nearly 122 minutes to mine just one block, which is the longest block production time in almost a decade.
After China began ordering a crackdown on the cryptocurrency mining sector, as AZCoin News reported, the average time needed to produce one block increased to nearly 13 minutes before Bitcoin’s most significant negative difficulty adjustment in its entire history.
Starting May 11, 2020, miners receive a reward of 6.25 BTC for each valid block. The biennial halving event, in which Bitcoin’s issuance rate drops by 50%, occurs after every 210,000th block. The chain will keep getting longer even after all the coins are mined, which is expected to happen roughly in 2140. Hence, as long as people keep transferring new coins, new blocks will continue added to the chain.
Read more:
- Bitcoin Price Action May Be Struggling, But We Can Hope For A Sell-Side Liquidity Crisis
- Bitcoin Price Was Lower After A Volatile Week, Regulatory Concerns Could Damp Sentiment In Market