Bitcoin Network Records 700,000th Block As Adoption Rises

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Bitcoin miners (BTC) officially produced their 700,000th block on September 11, marking a milestone for a network critics say has died 428 times since 2009.

It took Bitcoin less than two years to produce 100,000 more blocks after to reach the 600,000 milestone on October 18, 2019. At the time of the last 100,000 block milestone, the BTC price was worth less than $ 8,000. Today, a Bitcoin is worth over $ 45,500.

At the time of writing this article, the total supply of Bitcoin was 18,812,806, or 89.5% of all coins that will ever be produced. On average, new blocks are generated every ten minutes, although production time is impacted by mining difficulties. Bitcoin mining difficulty is adjusted approximately every two weeks, a process that resets how difficult it is for miners to mine the digital asset. At the current rate of block production, the final Bitcoin will be mined around the year 2140.

Crypto Twitter celebrated the milestone in quoting the late Hal Finney, one of the early pioneers of Bitcoin and a prime candidate to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the technology. Finney died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, in 2014.

Bitcoin has been programmed to be a self-regulating market with a hard-coded monetary policy that is not dependent on any outside party. Unlike the United States Federal Reserve, for example, which can affect the size and growth rate of the money supply at will, Bitcoin maintains a strict cap on supply and cannot be created without energy input. massive miners.

While Bitcoin has guest attacks on its environmental footprint, grid energy consumption is only a tiny fraction of total energy consumption. Efforts to incorporate clean energy into the mining process have proven to be largely successful, with some estimates claiming that over 50% of Bitcoin mining in the United States is powered by renewable energy.

Related: Blockstream and Macquarie Group Launch Bitcoin Mining Pilot Program

Thanks to Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies have grown into an asset class of over $ 2 trillion. Bitcoin’s share of the global market is 41%, or $ 857 billion, at the time of writing.