The Bitcoin halving is less than one week away, and crypto exchange Coinbase is hyping up the event with a new commercial.
Advertising the Halving
The platform released a video over Twitter on Monday illustrating how much Bitcoin’s value has appreciated over time by measuring its purchasing power in terms of pizza.
“Over time, your money gets you less. Does Bitcoin?” the ad’s narrator asks.
Food for thought:
What if money was designed to get you more over time, not less?#Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/z8eHF8JltQ— Coinbase 🛡️ (@coinbase) April 15, 2024
Back in 2010, early Bitcoin adopter Laszlo Hanyecz famously spent 10,000 Bitcoin to buy two pizzas, in what is widely known as the first-ever use of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. By 2012, just one Bitcoin could purchase a pizza, and by 2020, Bitcoin was worth thousands of dollars per coin.
“Roughly every four years, the future supply of Bitcoin is reduced,” Coinbase said. “So historically, you get more, not less. Bitcoin moves money forward.”
Coinbase refers to the “Bitcoin halving,” when Bitcoin’s supply issuance rate is cut in half every 210,000 blocks. The next Bitcoin halving takes place at block 840,000 in approximately 4 days, and will reduce Bitcoin block subsidy from 6.25 BTC per block to 3.125 BTC per block.
This effectively lowers Bitcoin’s inflation rate to be significantly less than that of gold, to which the asset’s boosters often compare the asset as a reliably scarce store of value. Historically, the event has also been followed by a sharp increase in Bitcoin’s price roughly 12 to 18 months later, theoretically due to the ensuing supply crunch.
Even Bitcoin miners are bullish on the event, despite the fact that it means reduced revenues for them in the short term.
“The supply shock of the halving has historically been linked to exponential runs in the price of Bitcoin, which counteracts the impact on miner revenues,” an IREN spokesperson told Cryptonews last week.
TD Bank Commercial
Coinbase isn’t the only one promoting the halving: even the multinational bank TD released a commercial last week emphasizing how Bitcoin’s halving creates a supply crunch.
“Bitcoin was designed so only 21 million coins can be created, but instead of flooding the market with all the coins at once, the supply of new coins is slowly released into the market every day,” the commercial stated.
By contrast, Coinbase released a report last year arguing that the halving isn’t as impactful on Bitcoin’s price as people think, and that the crypto market is more impacted by macroeconomic cycles.