Well, the Bitcoin protocol survived its much awaited block halving event.
Since block halvings are programmed to happen so infrequently (once every 210,000 blocks, or roughly once every four years), they are a cause of trepidation.
Yet this one appears to have gone off without any significant issues, although the price has not gone "lunar" as some Bitcoin supporters had hoped for - according to CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin prices are down about 2% over the last 24 hours, while #2 cryptocurrency Ethereum is up 2.56% and #4 crypto Litecoin is down 2.83%.
I'm seeing only about 10,300 unconfirmed transactions sitting around in the mempool, which is a good sign of Bitcoin network health post-halving - the existing mining network is doing a pretty good job of confirming transactions, even with the lower reward subsidy.
Guess it's time to go back to buying Bitcoins. But what do you think? Let me know in the comments below or over on Twitter where I'll be livetweeting some Bitcoin block halving statistics for a little while. And if you don't yet get my newsletter, do that. Big issue coming out on Monday analyzing some of the post-block halving data and what it might mean for the cryptocurrency marketplace as a whole.
Full disclosure: At time of publication, I do own some bitcoins in my long term portfolio, and some ethers as well. I am not an active day trader of either currency.