The Halvening means that bitcoin mining rewards just dropped by 50 percent
It just became significantly harder to mine Bitcoins. The halving event rolled around yesterday, July 9, and means that the reward for mining just dropped by 50 percent. The cryptocurrency is generated by machines around the world 'mining' for new bitcoins.
Rewards of bitcoins are handed out for giving over computing power to process bitcoin transactions. It's a very, very slow way to make money -- and it just got a whole lot slower. While there were previously 25 bitcoins (around $16,000) available globally to miners every 10 minutes, the figure is now just 12.5 bitcoins. But what does this mean for the digital currency?