The miners of Bitcoin have officially come about their 700,000th block on the 11th of September, which marks a major network milestone. This is quite surprising, as most detractors have believed the network of this cryptocurrency had died by around 428 times since 2009.
It took the cryptocurrency less than a couple of years to produce around 100,000 blocks after it reached a milestone of 600,000 blocks on the 18th of October, 2019. At the time of the last milestone of 100,000-block, the price of BTC was less than $8,000. Currently, the price of BTC is $45,500.
Bitcoin Riding A Major High
The total supply of BTC is 18,812,806, or almost 90% of every cryptocurrency that has ever been produced. On average, several new blocks keep getting generated every ten minutes, although the time of production is definitely impacted by the difficulty of mining. The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is always adjusted every two weeks, which is a process that keeps resetting how hard it is for miners to mine the main digital asset. At the current pace of the production of the blocks, the final cryptocurrency will be in the year 2140.
The Twitter-sphere exploded when the milestone was crossed, as they remembered Han Finney, one of the early pioneers of Bitcoin, and one of the prime candidates for being Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the blockchain technology. Finney passed away in 2014, after battling with ALS.
At that time, BTC was programmed as a self-regulating market with a very hard-coded monetary policy that would not be dependent on any outside parties. Unlike the United States Federal Reserve, for example, the cryptocurrency maintains a strict cap on its supply and will never be created unless the miners put in a massive input of energy.
Interestingly, while Bitcoin has been barraged with attacks over the environmental footprint it leaves, the energy usage of the network is just a tiny fraction of its total energy consumption.
