The 2024 Cycle: ETF, Halving & Runes

We worked out the halving and issuance schedule as pure arithmetic: the subsidy drops on a fixed block count and nobody can change it. In 2024 that abstract schedule collided with the real world. Three events landed within months of each other and reshaped how Bitcoin is owned, secured, and used. This page is a snapshot as of 2024–2025 — dates are firm, but prices and flows move fast, so treat any figure as a marker, not a forecast.

This is a “recent developments” page

Everything below is dated on purpose. Approval dates, block heights, and protocol launches are settled historical facts. Dollar prices, inflow totals, and “biggest/fastest” superlatives drift constantly — where they appear, they’re hedged and time-stamped. Don’t quote a price from here as current.

Event 1 — US spot Bitcoin ETFs (January 2024)

For over a decade the SEC rejected applications for a US spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund — a fund that holds actual bitcoin and trades like a stock. That changed on 10 January 2024, when the SEC approved a batch of roughly eleven spot bitcoin products at once; they began trading the next day, 11 January 2024. Among them were BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (ticker IBIT), Fidelity’s fund (FBTC), and the long-running Grayscale trust converted into an ETF (GBTC).

Why it mattered, structurally:

• A regulated on-ramp. Pensions, advisors, and ordinary brokerage accounts could now get bitcoin price exposure without touching keys, wallets, or exchanges — buying a ticker in an account they already had.
• Custody, not self-custody. The flip side is that ETF shares are a claim on bitcoin held by a custodian. As the textbook keeps stressing, “not your keys, not your coins” — an ETF is convenience bought with counterparty trust, the opposite of the self-sovereign ownership Bitcoin makes possible.
• Demand vs. fixed supply. ETFs buy real bitcoin to back their shares, pressing steady demand against a supply schedule that, as we’ll see, was about to tighten further.

It actually happened — the fake approval, one day early

On 9 January 2024, the day before the real decision, the SEC’s official account on X (formerly Twitter) was compromised and posted a false message claiming the ETFs were already approved. The price jumped, then snapped back when the SEC said the post was fake and unauthorized. The genuine approval came the next day. It’s a clean reminder that in this space, the announcement is not the event — and that even official channels can be spoofed.

Event 2 — the fourth halving (block 840,000, ~April 2024)

Right on schedule, the chain reached block height 840,000 in April 2024 (around 19–20 April), and the block subsidy fell from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. This was the fourth halving, putting freshly minted coins at just one-sixteenth of the original 50 BTC — exactly the geometric decay derived on the issuance page.

The structural significance is the security-budget shift. With each halving, the newly minted subsidy shrinks as a share of miner revenue, and transaction fees must carry more of the load that funds hashpower (see miner incentives). For most of the day-to-day, fees are still a minority of miner pay — but the halving block of 2024 gave a vivid preview of a fee-funded future, thanks to the third event.

Event 3 — Runes launches at the halving

Runes is a protocol for issuing fungible tokens directly on Bitcoin, created by Casey Rodarmor — the same developer behind Ordinals. By design, Runes activated at the halving block, height 840,000, so its launch and the subsidy cut happened in the same block.

Runes was a deliberate response to the mess left by BRC-20 tokens, which had been bolted onto Ordinals inscriptions and tended to bloat the UTXO set with dust. Runes instead works with Bitcoin’s grain: balances live in the UTXO model and protocol messages ride in a single OP_RETURN output, which is more efficient and doesn’t litter the chain with unspendable junk.

The launch set off a land-rush to “etch” and mint runes in the very first blocks, and the resulting bidding war made block 840,000 one of the most expensive blocks in Bitcoin’s history.

By the numbers — when fees dwarfed the subsidy

The halving block is the canonical “fees over subsidy” moment:

   Block 840,000  (≈ 20 April 2024)
   ────────────────────────────────
   new subsidy        =  3.125 BTC
   fees in the block  ≈ 37 BTC        (Runes-driven, approximate)
   ─────────────────────────────────
   total to the miner ≈ 40 BTC
   fees ÷ subsidy     ≈ 12×

For one block, fees were roughly an order of magnitude larger than the brand-new subsidy — a live glimpse of the long-run, fee-dominated security model the issuance page describes. (The exact fee figure is approximate and one-off; normal blocks are nowhere near this.)

Under the hood — why Runes is “UTXO-native”

A rune balance isn’t a row in a global account table — it’s attached to a UTXO, like satoshis themselves. “Etching” defines a new rune; “minting” and transfers move balances between outputs, with the protocol’s rules encoded in an OP_RETURN data output that Bitcoin’s consensus ignores but Runes-aware software reads. Because it reuses the UTXO and fee machinery you already understand, Runes adds a token layer without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules at all — it’s a convention layered on top, not a fork.

How to read the cycle (as of 2024–2025)

By late 2024, against the backdrop of these events, bitcoin’s price reached new all-time highs and crossed into six figures (USD) for the first time around December 2024. Treat that as a dated marker, not a trend line — prices are volatile and this page makes no prediction. The durable, structural takeaways are narrower and safer:

• Ownership broadened through a regulated, custodial wrapper (the ETF) — convenience traded for counterparty trust.
• Issuance tightened on schedule (the halving), pushing fees toward a larger future role.
• Usage showed that Bitcoin’s blockspace can be in fierce demand for reasons beyond payments (Runes, like Ordinals before it), which is good for the fee market but contested as a use of the chain.

The thread

How do these events bear on untrusting strangers sharing one ledger? The halving is the cleanest case: it fired automatically at a height everyone could compute in advance, with no committee, vote, or trusted party — predictable scarcity that each node enforces for itself. The ETF is the counter-example: it delivers exposure precisely by reintroducing a trusted custodian, stepping outside the trustless ledger to gain convenience. And Runes shows the ledger absorbing brand-new behavior without anyone’s permission, because the rules that strangers agree on are fixed and open — you can build on them without asking. The same trustless core explains all three.

Check your understanding

1. What is a spot bitcoin ETF, and why is “not your keys, not your coins” the key caveat for ETF holders?
2. Give the date the SEC approved the ETFs — and describe the incident that happened the day before.
3. At what block height did the 2024 halving occur, and what did the subsidy change to?
4. What problem with BRC-20 was Runes designed to address, and how does Runes use the UTXO model and OP_RETURN?
5. Why did block 840,000 become a preview of Bitcoin’s long-run security model?

Show answers

1. A spot bitcoin ETF is a fund that holds actual bitcoin and trades like a stock, giving price exposure through an ordinary brokerage account. The caveat: shares are a claim on bitcoin held by a custodian, not self-custodied coins — convenience bought with counterparty trust, the opposite of holding your own keys.
2. The SEC approved the ETFs on 10 January 2024 (trading began 11 January). The day before, on 9 January 2024, the SEC’s X account was compromised and posted a fake approval, briefly moving the price before the SEC said it was unauthorized.
3. The halving occurred at block height 840,000 (~April 2024), cutting the subsidy from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC — one-sixteenth of the original 50 BTC.
4. BRC-20 tokens were bolted onto Ordinals inscriptions and tended to bloat the UTXO set with dust. Runes instead keeps balances in UTXOs and encodes its protocol messages in a single OP_RETURN output — more efficient, and it adds a token layer without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
5. Runes launched in the same block (840,000), triggering a bidding war so intense that fees were roughly an order of magnitude larger than the new 3.125 BTC subsidy (≈ 37 BTC in fees). That’s a live glimpse of the future where fees, not subsidy, fund security.