And then some apparently. Via FTAlphaville:
Today’s the day that bitcoiners the world over have been waiting for. It’s the day – which only comes around every four years – that the supply of new bitcoins is cut in half. It’s the halvening! (OK yes, some bitcoiners just call it “the halving”, but we prefer the former because we feel it’s a nice illustration of the way much of Cryptoland doesn’t make a lot of sense.)
This halvening, like all other such halvenings, was actually programmed into the bitcoin protocol when it was invented over a decade ago, as a way of giving the cryptocurrency some scarcity. It was quite a nifty idea to give something that only exists as a string of 1s and 0s scarcity; other decentralised digital currencies before bitcoin suffered from the lack of this. (The problem, however, is that it turns out that there is no scarcity in the number of copycat cryptocurrencies, which undermines the idea of scarcity in bitcoin.)
