Author: Glassnode
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
Key points:
After 5,256 trading days, Bitcoin finally broke the $100,000 mark on December 5, with its market cap exceeding $2 trillion at one point.
Miners have cumulatively earned $71.49 billion, reflecting the security and economic incentives of the Bitcoin network.
The Bitcoin network has processed a total of 1.12 billion transactions, settling $131.25 trillion in transfer volume. The adjusted data can more clearly reflect real economic activity.
Details of holdings by different groups show that Bitcoin holders are widely distributed, covering both retail and institutional scale holders.
This article explores the evolution of the Bitcoin network and its economic foundation, reviewing Bitcoin's journey from the genesis block to breaking the $100,000 mark.
Market Expansion
Bitcoin's trading price has been active for 5,256 days, rising from a few cents to $100,000. This journey includes 72 positive monthly candlestick charts (including December 2024), with an average increase of 37.4%, and 71 negative monthly candlestick charts, with an average decrease of -14.2%.
This reflects a remarkable balance between bull and bear markets, as well as the positive skew that appears during the most important price increases.
As of December 5, a total of 19,791,952 BTC have been mined, accounting for 94.2% of the total supply of 21 million. Bitcoin's market cap temporarily surpassed $2 trillion, exceeding silver's market cap (around $1.84 trillion).
During this period of market expansion, investors realized $1.27 trillion in profits and $592 billion in on-chain losses (based on the difference between buying and selling prices). This led to a cumulative net capital inflow (actual market cap) of $750 billion, highlighting the immense value that has flowed into the Bitcoin network throughout its lifecycle.
Supply Distribution
Among the mined Bitcoins, the distribution of different wallet sizes is as follows:
<0.001 BTC: 5,491 BTC (0.027%)
0.001–0.01 BTC: 42,683 BTC (0.216%)
0.01–0.1 BTC: 271,641 BTC (1.373%)
0.1–1 BTC: 1,077,839 BTC (5.446%)
1–10 BTC: 2,093,845 BTC (10.581%)
10–100 BTC: 4,306,780 BTC (21.761%)
100–1,000 BTC: 4,342,868 BTC (21.935%)
1,000–10,000 BTC: 4,693,216 BTC (23.716%)
10,000–100,000 BTC: 2,309,654 BTC (11.671%)
>100,000 BTC: 647,934 BTC (3.274%)
Notably, most giant whale wallets (holding 1000+ BTC) are associated with exchanges, ETFs, and large institutions (like MicroStrategy). Each of these large entities represents collective ownership from thousands to millions of customers and shareholders.
Notable holdings include 1.8 million Bitcoins held on exchanges (accounting for 9.1% of supply) and 1.1 million Bitcoins managed by U.S. ETFs (accounting for 5.6% of supply). Additionally, miners (excluding Patoshi) hold 700,000 Bitcoins (accounting for 3.5% of supply), while the U.S. Treasury holds 187,000 Bitcoins (accounting for 0.9% of supply), reflecting the broad distribution of Bitcoin among various entities and highlighting the increasing institutionalization and centralization of Bitcoin custody. (Note: The earliest independent miners mined a large amount of Bitcoin, and the community believes this miner is Satoshi Nakamoto, referring to this mining mode as Patoshi.)
Network Evolution
Since the genesis block, a total of 873,304 blocks have been mined, with an average block generation time of 11.8 minutes for Bitcoin. Although the current average block interval is about 9.6 minutes due to increased hash rates, it started slowly in the early years as Satoshi underestimated the performance of laptop CPUs relative to the initial difficulty settings.
During the same period, the network difficulty increased sharply. With the increasing security and computing power behind Bitcoin, the network difficulty rose to 446,331,432,498,125,300,000,000 after 418 adjustments (excluding unadjusted periods).
The difficulty adjustment target of Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) consensus is to mine a block approximately every 10 minutes, regardless of how the network hash rate changes. Mining difficulty is dynamically adjusted every 2016 blocks (approximately 2 weeks) to align with the target block time of 600 seconds.
When Bitcoin reached $100,000, the network hash rate soared from 128,185 hashes/second to 804,407,834,059,443,100,000 hashes/second. So far, miners have cumulatively calculated approximately 5.01 x 10^28 hashes. Notably, 37% of the total hashes were calculated in 2024.
As of December 5, miners have earned a total of $71.49 billion, with the value of block rewards based on the day the block was mined. This income includes $67.31 billion in block subsidies earned through the minting of new coins and $4.18 billion in transaction fees paid by users. This accounts for only 3.57% of Bitcoin's peak market cap of $2 trillion, reflecting the immense return on investment in security budgets.
Bitcoin's transaction volume has also seen astonishing growth. To date, the Bitcoin network has successfully processed 1.12 billion transactions (unfiltered), filtering out internal transfers, with the actual economic transaction total at 840 million.
Calculated based on the dollar value of transactions at confirmation, the Bitcoin network has cumulatively processed $131.25 trillion in transaction volume. After adjustments, the filtered transfer volume is $11.63 trillion, accounting for only 8.86% of the total.
This reflects that most transactions are essentially economic in nature. However, the vast majority of on-chain transfer volume may relate to large exchanges and custodial wallet management.
Conclusion
Bitcoin's price rising to $100,000 not only symbolizes a price milestone but also demonstrates its extraordinary journey from a small corner of the internet to a significant global financial infrastructure. Since the genesis block, the Bitcoin network has surged, achieving a market cap of $2 trillion, surpassing silver, and settling $131 trillion in transaction volume through 1.12 billion transactions.
The network has paid miners a total value of $71.49 billion, accounting for just over 3% of its market valuation, to support their input costs, reflecting the astonishing returns on input costs. Bitcoin's hash rate is nearing historical highs, and the holder base is highly decentralized, making Bitcoin play an increasingly important role on the world stage.
Related reading: Data interpretation on how holders act after Bitcoin's new highs?
