On January 3, 2009, the pseudonymous developer(s) Satoshi Nakamoto bootstrapped the Bitcoin network by mining its first ever block, block 0. The Genesis Block, as it has become known, came etched with a message that would invariably position Bitcoin as an alternative monetary system to rival the realm of central banking: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” the memo read, in reference to a headline about the U.K. government’s actions during the global recession of 2008 and 2009.
The rest, as you no doubt know, is history. Eleven years on and Bitcoin has harnessed the fervor of a community that was inspired by the philosophical tenets embedded in the Genesis Block message. Bitcoin’s meteoric success in the past decade defied the expectations of believers and skeptics alike, and with a thriving market that has captured $130 billion in value, it has graduated from fringe interest to a global economic phenomenon.
To commemorate Bitcoin’s 11th birthday and usher in a new decade, we compiled some stats to plot Bitcoin’s growth from 2019 to 2020 and provide a hard picture of the state of the network today.
From 2019 to 2020, we saw the following year-over-year changes to Bitcoin’s market, network and technical infrastructure:
At the beginning of 2019, 601 contributors had provided 19,104 commits to the Bitcoin Core Github[1]; these figures would grow to 22,536 commits from 678 unique contributors by 2020.
Bitcoin’s price increased[2] from $3,860 to $7,180, an 85 percent increase from the onset of 2019 to the onset of 2020. This accompanied a doubling of bitcoin’s market capitalization from $65.5 billion to $131 billion.
Amidst the wider crypto market, bitcoin’s dominance[3] (i.e., its share of market value compared to that of altcoins) climbed from 51.8 to 68.3 percent.
