The earth’s largest cryptocurrency arrived at a milestone on Monday, Sept. 12 — Bitcoin (BTC) celebrated 5,000 times of uptime. The network has functioned almost with no hiccup for 13.69 years.
In Bitcoin speak, the blockchain continues to be online, confirming a legitimate block of transactions every ten minutes, typically, for 753,782 blocks (5,000 days). Plus, 3,464 days have passed since the last downtime incident.
The very first Bitcoin block was found by Satoshi Nakamoto on Jan. 3, 2009. Bitcoin spent 99.9% of the season online, confirming valid blocks typically every ten minutes until what is known the Value Overflow Incident. The incident refers to the development of a “strange block,” block 74,638, which led to the development of billions more Bitcoin. Five hrs later, during block 74,691, the blockchain was soft-forked, and nodes arrived at consensus.
In 2013, Bitcoin software split, and also the chain forked into two. The blockchain was lower for six hrs and twenty minutes creating a cost drop in excess of 23%, hitting lows of $37. Mixing the downtime from the Bitcoin network between 2010 and 2013 creates roughly .01% from the total time.
Bitcoin influencers (Bitfluencers?) were quick to recognition the occasion with celebratory boating accidents, events in which Bitcoiners lose their private keys. Others expressed their gratitude for that anonymous creator from the protocol:
5000 times of #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/oTdbmJG0Tk
— Lina Seiche (@LinaSeiche) September 11, 2022
Popular cryptocurrencies for example Solana (SOL) or Ether (ETH) cannot presently contend with the uptime nor decentralization that Bitcoin is famous. Solana regularly encounters outages, labeled a “curse” towards the network by its cofounder, while Ethereum’s creation was the effect of a hard fork.
Related: The Given, the Merge and $22K BTC — 5 items to know in Bitcoin now
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s cofounder, boasted in 2020 that “You could be internet lucrative with less than 60% uptime.” Nevertheless, Bitcoin continues to be a way from reaching Nakamoto’s commitment of a peer-to-peer cash system that removes organizations: Scaling payments on layer-2 are a constant fight.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin will need to accept to be the most dependable, most decentralized and many popular cryptocurrency solution.