The process will occur around Saturday, April 20, but it has been scheduled for over 15 years. Known as "halving," it has already happened three times since 2009, the year that bitcoin was created. Bitcoin has since become the best-known cryptocurrency. The operation is one of the keys to this market's novel way of functioning, providing it with one of its main characteristics: scarcity.

From its inception in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, bitcoin has been a deliberately rationed asset. Unlike "classic" currencies such as the euro or the dollar, whose quantities in circulation increase according to the decisions of central banks, there will never be more than 21 million units of bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto, its creator – a pseudonym whose true identity might be a single individual or a collective – decided it was going to be this way upon its creation. The reasoning behind capping the number of bitcoins that can be created is that this will avoid the "money printing" effect, which could lead to the depreciation of the currency. Since its scarcity has been planned from the outset, bitcoin can claim to be a hard currency, like gold, a natural and therefore limited resource.

This feature is intended to strengthen bitcoin's trustworthiness as a decentralized payment instrument, which enables its users to make transactions without intermediaries such as banks.

The mechanism for creating new bitcoins has not changed since the beginning. Transaction data are grouped together in a "block," which must be validated by a "proof of work": the deciphering of a complex, one-time digital code. This deciphering is carried out by "miners," internet users who try to find the solution to the enigma as quickly as possible. "For miners, working on a block is like looking for a padlock combination: if you're lucky, you'll find it easily enough, but otherwise, you'll have to test almost every possible combination. Miners do the same thing, but the combination they're looking for has 10,000 digits," explained Manuel Valente, the director of research for the Coinhouse cryptocurrency platform.

The growing complexity of this kind of mining has, over time, led to a "professionalization" of miners. Whereas, originally, any computer connected to the internet could validate a block, today's major mining "farms" have enormous computing capacities. Furthermore, some of them have been organized into pools. By pooling their computing capacities, they increase their chances of winning the race for validation – and therefore the reward.

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