Eight hundred weeks and two days after it was launched with the minting of its genesis block on January 3, 2009, #Bitcoin (#BTC) has passed one billion processed transactions the day before yesterday, according to the Clark Moody panel.
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In the 5,604 days of existence of the world's most valuable peer-to-peer money exchange network, an average of 178,475 transactions per day have been completed.
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Swan data indicates that the milestone was reached at block No. 842,241 at 21:34 UTC.
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Bitcoin took more than four years to reach 500 million transactions.
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The milestone occurs 15 years, four months and five days after Bitcoin's (BTC) pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, minted the network's first block on January 3, 2009.
The adventure begins
The first Bitcoin transaction took place on January 12, 2009 between the late cypherpunk #HalFinney and the protocol's creator, #SatoshiNakamoto, who sent the former 10 coins as proof. Shortly thereafter, Finney chatted by email with the mysterious founder to inform him of some bugs.
Finney continued to tinker with Bitcoin for some time, later shutting it down because it was heating up his computer too much. In the interim, he was surprised to discover that it actually had monetary value in late 2010.
Finney, a leading candidate to be Satoshi in real life, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, passing away in 2014 after a long battle.
Then, evolution has been the name of the game:
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The network eventually surpassed 1 million transactions in July 2011, trading at around USD $15.
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By the end of 2015, it recorded 100 million transactions, when its price was at about USD $455.
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In February 2020, the network surpassed 500 million transactions, trading just above USD $10,000.
A key couple of years
The milestone comes at a particularly exciting time for Bitcoin, which has seen daily transaction levels rise over the past year as new protocols such as Ordinals and Runes attract increasing activity on its blockchain. The launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs also generated bullish sentiment toward the cryptoasset during 2023.
Indeed, daily transactions in Bitcoin spiked around the network's fourth halving (quadrennial event that halves the bitcoin output of each block) on April 20, including a record 926,000 transactions processed on April 23.
Much of this demand came from the launch of the Runes protocol - a new Bitcoin token standard - at block 840,000.
That said, Bitcoin's daily transaction count has since cooled to 660,260 on May 4. Nevertheless, the seven-day moving average of transactions on the blockchain remains high compared to most of Bitcoin's history.
Long, slow journey
Although Bitcoin is the oldest cryptocurrency network, **its blockchain is far from the first of its kind to reach the milestone **of 1 billion processed transactions.
Bitcoin's biggest rival, #Ethereum (ETH), has processed nearly 2.4 billion transactions since its launch in July 2015, according to Etherscan data.
Meanwhile, at an average rate of 6 transactions per second over the past 30 days, according to Clark Moody's dashboard, Bitcoin has had a longer, slower journey to this latest milestone.
(Monthly transactions on the Bitcoin network. Some 15.5 million transactions have been recorded in the last 30 days. Source: The Block.)
LightningNetwork only
One thing to note is that the transaction count does not include those conducted on #LightningNetwork (LN), a Layer 2 Bitcoin network focused primarily on micropayments.
Data from Bitcoin River's proprietary exchange found that the LN network processed a lower bound estimate of 6.6 million transactions in August 2023 alone, which could suggest that hundreds of millions of transactions have taken place on LN since its launch in January 2018.
Bitcoin Scalable, yes or no?
Despite this milestone, the scalability of Bitcoin is still under debate. In the opinion of crypto analyst Colin Talks Crypto, potential scalability issues and challenges persist as Bitcoin continues to grow.
For him, Bitcoin's price could see "euphoric spikes" that would lead to a significant increase in transaction fees because of massive congestion. It is a scenario that could make transactions unaffordable for many. as fees could exceed the balance on more than 90% of Bitcoin addresses, making these virtually unusable.
"It could also mean weeks or even months of waiting for the transaction backlog to clear from the mempool. This is when I think things have a chance to change. [...] Only when congestion and fees have gotten bad enough for most people to stop using the system will there be enough outcry to finally increase the block size. In my opinion, it might take things to get worse beyond the 2015-2017 transaction backlog and high fees to cause change."
Colin's perspective highlights a critical debate within the Bitcoin community, divided over the best way forward:
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Those advocating significant changes to the protocol to improve scalability, such as increasing block size to handle more transactions and reduce fees.
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Those resisting such changes, believing that the current infrastructure, including secondary layers such as LN, will evolve to meet demand, with a focus on maintaining decentralization and security.
This evolution is expected to occur without compromising Bitcoin's founding principles and to maintain the core values of the system. All this as Bitcoin begins the long journey to two billion total transactions.
See you there.