After almost a month of work, I'm proud to present part three of my Halving series. Since moving house a month ago, I've spent almost every spare minute drawing. The fourth Halving is approaching!
 
For each Halving, I will create a tribute, all identical in structure and seamlessly connected, like one Bitcoin block to the next. After three months of working on this series, the upcoming Halving will mark the end of this series for the time being.
 
I will draw part 5 in 2027/2028, when the fifth Halving takes place with block 1,050,000. The central circular chart filled up again another 210000 blocks later. At the first Halving it was 50% filled clockwise, at the second Halving it was already 75% full and at the block of the third Halving 87.5% as 87.5% (18,375,000 Bitcoin) of all Bitcoin ever available. For the last part of this series for the time being, Halving IV, this circle will be 93.75% full.
 
Below are a few basic facts and figures about block 630000, which I have included in the drawing:
 
– the first block of the fourth epoch
– took place on May 11, 2020
– block subsidy: 6.25 Bitcoin/block
– supply: 18,375,000 Bitcoin (87.5%)
– the median fee for the third Halving block was ~90 sat/vB
– 3134 transactions and a storage space requirement of 1.19 MB are included in this block
 
The hash of block 630000: 00000000000000000000024bead8df69990852c202db0e0097c1a12ea637d7e96d. Note the number of zeros at the beginning. Whereas there were 13 zeros at halving I, one Halving later there are already 17 zeros and 19 zeros at the third halving. This shows the increasing mining difficulty: the more zeros at the beginning of the hash, the more hashes per second were required to determine the valid block. This number of zeros will also increase with each Halving.
 
The approximate hashrate that secured the network to block 630000: ~139.25 EH/s. During Halving II, it was still around 1.5 EH/s. This means that the hash rate increased by a factor of 100 in the period from 2016 to 2020!
 
A closer look reveals a few other elements that should of course be familiar to die-hard Bitcoiners.