The world’s largest cryptocurrency reached a milestone on Monday, September 12: bitcoin (BTC) celebrated 5,000 days of operation. The network worked almost uninterrupted for 13.69 years.
In bitcoin parlance, the blockchain is online and verifies a valid transaction block every 10 minutes, so it has validated 753,782 blocks (5,000 days) on average. Additionally, 3,464 days have passed since the last downtime incident.
Satoshi Nakamoto minted the first Bitcoin block on January 3, 2009. Bitcoin spent 99.9% of the year online, confirming valid blocks on average every 10 minutes until it was recognized as an overflow event. This incident refers to the creation of a “strange block”, block 74,638, which led to the creation of billions of additional bitcoins. Five hours later, at block 74,691, the blockchain was soft-forked, and the nodes reached a consensus.
In 2013, the Bitcoin protocol split, and the chain forked in two. The blockchain was disrupted for 6 hours and 20 minutes, causing the price to drop by more than 23%, reaching a low of $37. The combination of Bitcoin network downtime between 2010 and 2013 is about 0.01% of the total time.
Bitcoin Influencers (Bitfluencers?) that they are keen ofto honor celebrating the event hold on the market. Others expressed their gratitude to the anonymous creator of the protocol:
5000 days of it #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/oTdbmJG0Tk
— Lina Seiche (@LinaSeiche) September 11, 2022
5000 days of #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/oTdbmJG0Tk — Lina Seiche (@LinaSeiche) September 11, 2022.
Currently popular cryptocurrencies such as Solana (SOL) or ether (ETH) cannot compete with the uptime and decentralization that bitcoin is known for. Solana experiences frequent outages, which its co-founder described as a “curse” for the network, and Ethereum is created as a result of a hard fork.
Also read: The FED, The Merge and $22,000 BTC – 5 things to know about bitcoin this week
Vitalik Buterin is the co-founder of Ethereum vaunted in 2020 “you can be profitable with just 60% uptime. However, bitcoin still has a long way to go from achieving Nakamoto’s promise of a peer-to-peer currency system that removes third parties: Scaling payments to Layer 2 is an uphill battle.
In the meantime, bitcoin will have to settle for being the most secure, decentralized and popular cryptocurrency solution.
