Authors: CryptoVizArt, UkuriaOC, Glassnode; Compiled by: Deng Tong, Jinse Finance
Abstract
On December 5, the price of Bitcoin first broke the $100,000 barrier after 5,256 trading days, with its market cap briefly exceeding $2 trillion.
Since its inception, miners' cumulative revenue has reached $71.49 billion, reflecting the network's strong security and economic incentives.
The network has processed a total of 1.12 billion transactions, settling a transaction volume of $131.25 trillion, with entity-adjusted data more clearly reflecting actual economic activity.
The breakdown of supply held by different groups highlights the wide distribution of Bitcoin ownership, from retail investors to institutional-scale holders.
This article reviews the extraordinary journey of Bitcoin from the genesis block to surpassing the $100,000 per BTC milestone. On December 5, Bitcoin first reached this milestone.
This report explores the evolution of the Bitcoin network and its economic foundation, tracing the incredible journey from zero to this groundbreaking achievement.
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 candlesticks (including December 2024), with an average increase of 37.4%, and 71 negative monthly candlesticks, with an average decrease of -14.2%.
This reflects a fascinating balance between bull and bear markets and the notorious positive skew during the most severe price increases.
As of December 5, a total of 19,791,952 BTC have been mined, accounting for 94.2% of the final supply cap of 21 million. Bitcoin's market cap briefly surpassed $2 trillion, convincingly exceeding the market cap of the precious metal silver (approximately $1.84 trillion).
During this extraordinary period of market expansion, investors have collectively realized $1.27 trillion in profits and -$592 billion in on-chain losses (based on the difference between acquisition prices and disposal prices). This led to a cumulative net capital inflow (actual market value) of $750 billion, highlighting the immense value that has flowed into the Bitcoin network throughout its lifecycle.
Supply Distribution
In the total mined Bitcoin supply, the distribution among different wallet size groups 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 of these large wallets (holding 1,000+ BTC) are associated with large institutional entities such as exchanges, ETFs, and MicroStrategy. Each of these large entities represents collective ownership of thousands to millions of customers and shareholders.
On December 5, noteworthy total balances included 1.8 million BTC held by exchanges (9.1% of supply) and 1.1 million BTC managed by U.S. ETFs (5.6% of supply), with significant growth since their launch on January 11, 2024. Additionally, miners (excluding Patoshi) retained a balance of 700,000 BTC (3.5% of supply), while the U.S. Treasury holds 187,000 BTC (0.9% of supply), reflecting a broad distribution of ownership among different entities.
These balances also highlight the increasing institutionalization and centralization of Bitcoin custody, balancing individual ownership with a greater total holding that drives liquidity and market stability.
Network Evolution
Next, we will focus on the evolution of the Bitcoin network, tracing its journey as a system for transferring financial value since its inception. We will explore milestones, technological advancements, and adoption trends that have transformed Bitcoin from an experiment into a global financial phenomenon, paving the way for its $100,000 price milestone.
Since the genesis block, a total of 873,304 blocks have been mined, with an average Bitcoin block time of 11.8 minutes, reaching a historical price of $100,000 on December 5, 2024. Although the contemporary average block interval is faster due to increased hash rate, approximately 9.6 minutes, it started slowly in the early years as Satoshi overestimated the performance of laptop CPUs relative to the initial difficulty settings.
During the same period, network difficulty (measured in units representing the computational workload required to mine a block) increased dramatically. After 418 difficulty adjustments (excluding periods without adjustments), network difficulty has risen to 446,331,432,498,125,300,000,000, reflecting the growing security and computational power behind Bitcoin.
The difficulty adjustment goal in Bitcoin's proof-of-work (PoW) consensus is to mine a block approximately every 10 minutes, regardless of how the network hash rate changes. It dynamically adjusts mining difficulty every 2016 blocks (about 2 weeks) to maintain alignment with the target block time of 600 seconds.
When Bitcoin reached $100,000, the network hash rate soared from 128,185 hashes/second to over 804,407,834,059,443,100,000 hashes/second. So far, miners have cumulatively calculated about 5.01 x 10^28 hashes. Notably, 37% of the total calculated hashes occurred in the year 2024.
As of December 5, miners' cumulative revenue from computational work is $71.49 billion, with the value of block rewards based on the day of block mining. This revenue includes $67.31 billion in block subsidies obtained through minting new coins and $4.18 billion in transaction fees paid by users. This accounts for only 3.57% of Bitcoin's peak market valuation of $2 trillion, reflecting a significant return on investment for security budgets.
Bitcoin's transaction volume has also seen astonishing growth. So far, the network has successfully processed 1.12 billion transactions (unfiltered).
Glassnode's entity-adjusted heuristic approach integrates activities between addresses considered controlled by the same entity (e.g., ETFs or exchanges). This can filter out internal transfers and provide a clearer understanding of the actual economic activities occurring on-chain.
Using our entity-adjusted total transaction count variant, we can filter out about 280 million internal transactions, leaving a total of 840 million actual economic transactions for BTC so far.
Based on the dollar value of transactions at the time of confirmation, the Bitcoin network has processed a cumulative transaction volume of $131.25 trillion. After entity adjustments, the filtered transfer volume is $11.63 trillion, accounting for only 8.86% of the total.
This reflects that most transaction counts are essentially economic in nature. However, the vast majority of on-chain transfer volume may relate to activity managed by large exchanges and custodial wallets.
Summary
Bitcoin's journey to $100,000 per BTC not only symbolizes a price milestone but also demonstrates its extraordinary journey from a small corner of the internet to a significant piece of global financial infrastructure. Since the genesis block, the network has skyrocketed, achieving a market cap of $2 trillion, surpassing silver, and settling a transaction volume of $131 trillion through 1.12 billion transactions.
The network has paid a cumulative value of $71.49 billion to miners, just slightly over 3% of its market valuation, to support its own input costs, reflecting an incredible return on input costs. With a hash rate approaching historical highs and a highly decentralized holder base, Bitcoin plays an increasingly important role on the world stage.
