The world’s largest cryptocurrency reached a milestone on Monday, Sept. 12 — Bitcoin (BTC) celebrated 5,000 days of uptime. The community has functioned nearly and not using a hiccup for 13.69 years.
In Bitcoin communicate, the blockchain has been on-line, confirming a sound block of transactions each 10 minutes, on common, for 753,782 blocks (5,000 days). Plus, 3,464 days have passed since the final downtime incident.
The primary Bitcoin block was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto on Jan. 3, 2009. Bitcoin spent 99.9% of the 12 months on-line, confirming legitimate blocks on common each 10 minutes till what is called the Value Overflow Incident. The incident refers to the creation of a “unusual block,” block 74,638, which resulted within the creation of billions extra Bitcoin. 5 hours later, throughout block 74,691, the blockchain was soft-forked, and nodes reached consensus.
In 2013, Bitcoin software program cut up, and the chain forked into two. The blockchain was down for six hours and 20 minutes inflicting a worth drop of greater than 23%, hitting lows of $37. Combining the downtime of the Bitcoin community between 2010 and 2013 creates roughly 0.01% of the entire time.
Bitcoin influencers (Bitfluencers?) were fast to honor the event with celebratory boating accidents, occasions through which Bitcoiners lose their private keys. Others expressed their gratitude for the anonymous creator of the protocol:
5000 days of #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/oTdbmJG0Tk
— Lina Seiche (@LinaSeiche) September 11, 2022
Common cryptocurrencies comparable to Solana (SOL) or Ether (ETH) can’t at present compete with the uptime nor decentralization for which Bitcoin is thought. Solana repeatedly experiences outages, labeled a “curse” to the network by its cofounder, whereas Ethereum’s creation was the result of a hard fork.
Associated: The Fed, the Merge and $22K BTC — 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s cofounder, boasted in 2020 that “You will be internet worthwhile with as little as 60% uptime.” Nonetheless, Bitcoin continues to be a way from reaching Nakamoto’s promise of a peer-to-peer money system that removes third events: Scaling payments on layer-2 are an uphill battle.
Within the meantime, Bitcoin must accept being essentially the most safe, most decentralized and hottest cryptocurrency answer.
