Written by: CryptoVizArt, UkuriaOC, Glassnode
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
Key Points:
After 5,256 trading days, Bitcoin first broke the $100,000 mark on December 5, with its market cap exceeding $2 trillion at one point.
Miners have earned a total of $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 a transfer volume of $131.25 trillion, with entity-adjusted data providing a clearer reflection of actual economic activity.
The detailed holdings of different groups show that Bitcoin holders are widely distributed, covering both retail and institutional-sized 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
The trading price of Bitcoin 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 the wonderful balance between bull and bear markets, as well as the positive skew that appears during the most significant price surges.
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 coins. Bitcoin's market cap briefly surpassed $2 trillion, surpassing the market cap of silver (approximately $1.84 trillion).
During this period of market expansion, investors realized $1.27 trillion in profits and incurred $592 billion in on-chain losses (based on the difference between buy and sell prices). This led to a net capital inflow (actual market value) of $750 billion, highlighting the enormous value that has flowed into the Bitcoin network over its lifecycle.
Supply Distribution
The distribution of mined Bitcoins across 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%)
It is worth noting that most large whale wallets (holding 1,000+ BTC) are associated with exchanges, ETFs, and large institutions (such as 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 (9.1% of the supply) and 1.1 million Bitcoins managed by U.S. ETFs (5.6% of the supply). Additionally, miners (excluding Patoshi) hold 700,000 Bitcoins (3.5% of the supply), while the U.S. Treasury holds 187,000 Bitcoins (0.9% of the supply), reflecting a 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 number of Bitcoins, and the community believes this miner is Satoshi Nakamoto, referring to this mining model 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. Although the current average block interval is about 9.6 minutes due to an increase in hash rate, the early years had a slow start because Satoshi overestimated the performance of laptop CPUs relative to the initial difficulty setting.
During the same period, network difficulty increased dramatically. As the security and computational power behind Bitcoin continued to grow, 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. The mining difficulty is dynamically adjusted every 2016 blocks (approximately 2 weeks) to maintain consistency with the target block time of 600 seconds.
When Bitcoin reached $100,000, the network hash rate surged 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, the hashes calculated in 2024 account for 37% of the total hashes.
As of December 5, miners have cumulatively earned $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 obtained from minting new coins and $4.18 billion in transaction fees paid by users. This accounts for only 3.57% of Bitcoin's peak market value of $2 trillion, reflecting the huge returns on input security budgets.
The trading volume of Bitcoin has also seen remarkable growth. To date, the Bitcoin network has successfully processed 1.12 billion transactions (unfiltered), filtering out internal transfers, with the actual economic transaction total being 840 million.
Calculated based on the dollar value at confirmation, the Bitcoin network has cumulatively processed a transaction volume of $131.25 trillion. 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 the on-chain transfer volume is likely related to management of large exchanges and custodial wallets.
Conclusion
The rise of Bitcoin's price to $100,000 not only symbolizes a price milestone but also proves its extraordinary journey from a small corner of the internet to a crucial piece of global financial infrastructure. Since the genesis block, the Bitcoin network has made significant progress, reaching 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 total of $71.49 billion in value to miners, which is just over 3% of its market valuation, to support their input costs, reflecting the astonishing returns on input costs. The hash rate of Bitcoin is near historical highs, and the holder base is highly decentralized, with Bitcoin playing an increasingly important role on the world stage.
