Bitcoin rose above $64,000 on Friday after dropping below the $60,000 mark, as the cryptocurrency continues to experience volatility ahead of the upcoming halving. The upcoming halving is slated to take place this week.

The Bitcoin halving will occur on or around April 20th. Here's a guide for the uninitiated to what's going on, and why it's important.

Bitcoin's long-anticipated 'halving' is, depending on where you sit, a vital event that will burnish the cryptocurrency's value as an increasingly scarce commodity, or little more than a technical change talked up by speculators to inflate its price.

Sometime in the next few days or even hours, the “miners” who chisel bitcoins out of complex mathematics are going to take a 50% pay cut — effectively slicing new production of the world’s largest cryptocurrency in half.

Process has coincided with a rise in price in the past and is due to take place again on Saturday

Bitcoin aficionados are hoping that a scheduled reduction in the number of new coins going into circulation will cause the price of the cryptocurrency to skyrocket.

The cryptocurrency’s creator—who went by Satoshi Nakamoto, but whose real identity remains unknown—invented bitcoin the following year, and dreamed of creating an international currency that would operate outside the control of governments or central banks.

It’s “Economics 101” that halving should theoretically bring higher bitcoin prices, but the token’s recent performance doesn’t indicate much hype.

Sounding like the name of a pretty graphic horror film, the halving is actually an event that occurs every four years in the crypto space. And it’s often the catalyst for big gains. Whether you actively invest in Bitcoin,