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Block after block, Bitcoin reveals the power of programmable monetary policy, even as its detractors keep declaring it dead.
Bitcoin (BTC) miners officially produced their 700,000th block on September 11, marking a major milestone for a network whose detractors claim they have declared it dead 428 times since 2009.
It took less than two years for Bitcoin to produce 100,000 more blocks after reaching the 600,000 milestone on October 18, 2019. By the time of the last 100,000 blocks milestone, the price of BTC was worth less than $ 8,000. Today, one Bitcoin is worth more than $ 45,500.
Today the total supply of Bitcoin was 18,812,806, that is, 89.5% of all the currencies that will exist. On average, new blocks are generated every ten minutes, although production time is affected by the difficulty of mining. Bitcoin's mining difficulty is adjusted roughly every two weeks, a process that resets the difficulty for miners to mine the digital asset. At the current rate of block production, the last Bitcoin will be mined around 2140.
The crypto community on Twitter celebrated the milestone by citing the late Hal Finney, one of the early pioneers of Bitcoin and a leading candidate to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym creator of the cryptocurrency. Finney passed away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, in 2014.
Bitcoin fue programado para ser un mercado autorregulado con una politica monetaria codificada que no depende de ninguna parte externa. A diferencia de la Reserva Federal de los Estados Unidos, por ejemplo, que puede afectar el tamano y la tasa de crecimiento de la oferta monetaria a placer, Bitcoin mantiene un limite fijo en la oferta y no puede crearse sin el aporte masivo de energia de los mineros.
Although Bitcoin is under attack for its environmental impact, the energy use of the network is a small fraction of the total energy consumption. Efforts to incorporate clean energy into the mining process appear to have been successful, with some estimates claiming that Bitcoin mining in the United States is powered by more than 50% renewable energy.
Thanks to Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies have grown to become a more than $ 2 trillion asset class. Bitcoin's share of the global market is 41%, or $ 857 billion, at the time of writing.
