Litecoin Halving: All You Need to Know Before the Day

Halving is a process that occurs when the mining reward for a cryptocurrency is reduced by 50%. Miners receive crypto rewards for solving problems that create each new block on a given blockchain.

Although it's difficult to say when the final Litecoins will be mined, the Litecoin Foundation estimates that it will be around 2142, when the maximum of 84 million Litecoins will be reached.

Miners need to invest in powerful, specialized equipment to take on the computing challenges required for creating blocks.

Mining is now a big business, and businesses need to make a profit.

The fact that miners will feel the heat after the halving is no secret, with Litecoin creator Charlie Lee predicting that many will shut up shop after Aug 5.

"When the mining rewards get cut in half, some miners will not be profitable and they will shut off their machine. If a big percentage does that, then blocks will slow down for some time. For litecoin it's three and a half days before the next change, so possibly like seven days of slower blocks, and then after that, the difficulty will readjust and everything will be fine."

Once the hash rate drops below a certain point, the mining difficulty will adjust itself and smaller miners may be able to begin mining once again.

"Litecoin's scrypt algorithm is pretty unique so the hardware used to mine it is not easily adaptable to mining other tokens. Therefore it doesn't have quite the same of competition over hashrate that some of the other cons have. My feeling is that LTC miners have had ample time to prepare for the halving so we shouldn't see any major changes."

Binance researchers analyzed Charlie Lee's prediction that many miners would have to halt operations and looked into how merged mining could help keep miners on-board even after rewards have been reduced.

The three most prominent examples of merged mining are the Litecoin-merged Namecoin, Bitcoin-merged Dogecoin and Myriadcoin, a cryptocurrency merged with both BTC and LTC. The report theorized that merged mining could help mitigate the impact of reward reductions by future block rewards scheduled for both Litecoin and Bitcoin.