If You Invested $1,000 In Bitcoin At The Last Bitcoin Halving, Here's How Much You'd Have Today

The 2024 year could go down as one for the history books for leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin BTC/USD. Along with increased optimism that Bitcoin ETFs will be approved, the next Bitcoin halving will likely happen in April 2024.

Here's a look at what this means and how investors have profited since the last Bitcoin halving.

What Happened: A Bitcoin halving occurs every 210,000 blocks, which happens roughly every four years. The block rewards get halved as soon as the 210,000^th block is mined.

Bitcoin halving is a method put in place for the cryptocurrency to help enforce synthetic price inflation until all Bitcoin has been mined and released. Theoretically, the Bitcoin halvings that occur should make it more expensive to create new Bitcoins and make the cryptocurrency more valuable.

Bitcoin acts the opposite of fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar with this method as currencies often lose their purchasing power over time instead of becoming more valuable.

The first Bitcoin halving happened on Nov. 28, 2012, with the block reward reduced from 50 Bitcoin to 25 Bitcoin.

The second Bitcoin halving happened on July 9, 2016, with the block reward reduced from 25 Bitcoin to 12.5 Bitcoin.  

The third Bitcoin halving happened on May 11, 2020, with the block reward reduced from 12.5 Bitcoin to 6.25 Bitcoin.

Bitcoin halving can make the cryptocurrency increasingly volatile, but often leads to surges in the price. Bitcoin went from $12 to $1,217 in the one year after the first halving.

With the next Bitcoin halving likely to occur in April 2024, here's a look back at how much the cryptocurrency is up since the last halving event.

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Investing $1,000 in Bitcoin: The last halving date for Bitcoin was on May 11, 2020. Bitcoin traded between $8,374.32 and $9,033.47 on that day.

A $1,000 investment could have purchased 0.1107 BTC based on the highest price on the last halving date.

The $1,000 investment would be worth $4,995.52 today, based on a price of $45,126.62 for Bitcoin at the time of writing. This represents a gain of 399.6% since the last Bitcoin halving that came three and a half years ago.

For comparison, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY, which tracks the S&P 500 stock market index, is up 71.1% over the same time period, based on an adjusted closing price of $276.28 on May 11, 2020.

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