The world’s largest cryptocurrency reached a milestone on Monday, Sept. 12 — Bitcoin (BTC) celebrated 5,000 days of uptime. The community has functioned virtually with out a hiccup for 13.69 years.
In Bitcoin converse, the blockchain has been on-line, confirming a legitimate block of transactions each 10 minutes, on common, for 753,782 blocks (5,000 days). Plus, 3,464 days have handed 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 named the Worth Overflow Incident. The incident refers back 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 break 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 whole time.
Bitcoin influencers (Bitfluencers?) were fast to honor the event with celebratory boating accidents, occasions during which Bitcoiners lose their personal 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
In style cryptocurrencies corresponding to Solana (SOL) or Ether (ETH) can’t at the moment compete with the uptime nor decentralization for which Bitcoin is understood. Solana frequently experiences outages, labeled a “curse” to the community by its cofounder, whereas Ethereum’s creation was the results of a tough fork.
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Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s cofounder, boasted in 2020 that “You may be web worthwhile with as little as 60% uptime.” Nonetheless, Bitcoin remains to be a way from reaching Nakamoto’s promise of a peer-to-peer money system that removes third events: Scaling funds on layer-2 are an uphill battle.
Within the meantime, Bitcoin must accept being probably the most safe, most decentralized and hottest cryptocurrency resolution.
