In recent days Bitcoin has reached and exceeded 1 billion worth of transaction costs generated with cryptocurrency, thus surpassing this historic milestone on the occasion of its eleventh anniversary of life.
The data, collected and estimated by the analysis company Coin Metrics, have in fact revealed that over 200.000 bitcoins have been paid in transaction fees since it was launched in 2009, or three months after its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, published the white paper on cryptocurrency, revealing it for the first time in the world. It was in fact on October 31, 2008 when Nakamoto exposed in a study the details of a "new fully peer-to-peer electronic payment system", which could have been used even without banks and other third party operators.
From the time, the popularity of Bitcoin it has evidently increased, but although the volume of transactions has grown considerably, the actual cost of the same has steadily decreased thanks to the implementation of solutions such as Lightning Network, which helps speed up and simplify transactions on the blockchain.
"Bitcoin users have operated consistently across the network throughout the year and solutions like the Lightning Network have grown in size"Said Galen Danziger, co-founder of MouseBelt, at The Independent.
The 2019 was a relatively positive year for Bitcoin, especially when compared to the seemingly definitive decline of the encrypted currency market experienced in the 2018. After reaching a peak of almost 20.000 dollars in December 2017, Bitcoin has indeed fallen below the 4.000 dollars, before finally recording a recovery at the beginning of this year.
Of course, this does not mean that the future path for cryptocurrency is devoid of obstacles, considering that it still faces a rich set of challenges before it can be considered a legitimate and traditional form of payment, such as regulatory, price volatility and security issues that make portfolios and exchanges vulnerable to hacking (estimated for example, this year some 4,2 billion dollars of encrypted currency were stolen by hackers, exceeding the total record last year).
"While we celebrate the eleventh anniversary of Bitcoin, it is important to reflect on how far we have come as an industry"Pascal Gauthier, CEO of blockchain security company Ledger, told The Independent. "The market is maturing, institutional investors continue to embrace the crypto currencies, and the long 'crypto winter' is behind us. Despite these advances, security is still late". Gauthier also stated that Bitcoin's core technology "it has the potential to change the world in many ways beyond finance, but without security this potential cannot be realized ”.
