[yebyen]

I am the one who is misinformed!

I was also wondering how to reconcile this (seemingly very) early first halving with my concept of a 21 year bitcoin generation span. Thanks for clearing that up!

*edit: Turns out I was misinformed about the 21 year thing too. These projections have the halving terminating estimated at 2140. Don't suppose either of us will be around to see it.

[jamoes]

And, actually, it may continue well beyond 2140. The only reason it would stop there is because the smallest value bitcoin can currently represent is 0.00000001 BTC (1e-8). Many people believe that the rising value of bitcoin will bring about a need to increase the number of decimal places that bitcoin supports. If this change is made to the protocol before 2140, the the mining reward will probably keep on halving to values even less than 1e-8 BTC.