Inside the Four-Year Pay Cut That Is Pushing Bitcoin Miners Toward AI

Four cuts, one rule

The pattern is baked into bitcoin's original code: every 210,000 blocks, or roughly four years, the reward halves again, all the way down toward almost nothing by around the year 2140. I dug up the original 2010 forum post rather than repeat the secondhand paraphrase that usually circulates. Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, defended the design that August by comparing it to an older industry.

Why miners either adapt or disappear

Cutting the reward in half does not just make bitcoin scarcer. It cuts the revenue of every mining company on the planet in half too, unless the price rises enough to cover the gap, and it does not always do that on schedule. Ahead of the 2028 halving, that math was already worrying analysts who cover the sector for a living.

Some publicly traded miners are responding by becoming something else entirely. High-performance computing, the kind of data center capacity that trains AI models, can run net operating margins north of 80 percent, against mining economics that Todaro described as sitting at or near breakeven for many operators already. Frank Holmes of HIVE Digital Technologies framed the survival test in blunter terms: the companies that make it through, he said, will be the ones with the best power contracts, the best sites, and the most flexibility to pivot.

The industry throws itself a party anyway

None of that stopped anyone from celebrating the last one. When the 2024 halving hit, the bitcoin community marked it with actual parties, not metaphorical ones: a halving festival in Mysen, Norway, gatherings in Santorini, Saint Malo, Denver, and Berlin, and a multi-day European Halving Party in Warsaw. In Amsterdam, the crypto firm Blockrise served as official countdown partner for a halving event called BitFest, putting the clock up on the big screen for a room full of guests waiting to watch a number tick down to zero.

It is a strange thing to throw confetti over: a piece of arithmetic executing exactly as scheduled inside a global network of computers. But bitcoin has always run on that kind of collective theater, and a halving is one of the few moments the code gives everyone a specific date to show up for.

What to watch for in 2028

The next halving is expected sometime in April 2028, at block 1,050,000, though the exact calendar date depends on how quickly blocks get mined between now and then, which is why trackers list dates ranging from early to mid-April rather than one fixed day. What is fixed is the arithmetic: daily issuance falls from about 450 bitcoin to about 225, miner revenue takes the same cut unless demand keeps pace, and somewhere between now and 2140, the last fraction of the last bitcoin gets mined and the schedule simply ends.

Whether that squeezes another wave of miners into the AI business, or whether bitcoin's price ends up covering the gap instead, is not a question the code can answer. I don't think that outcome is written yet. It is still up to the market, and to whoever is left standing when the reward gets cut again.