Jameson Lopp is an engineer at BitGo and the creator of Statoshi.info.

The following article is an exclusive contribution to the CoinDesk 2017 edition.

I've always been fascinated by the raw numbers relating to the operational status and growth of bitcoin, especially when we ride the roller coaster of the life cycle of adoption .

That's why I created Statoshi.info in 2014 to track bitcoin metrics from the point of view of a complete node.

For the same purpose, I compiled statistical measures of bitcoin growth in 2017 from various sources.

A number of things are clear: Bitcoin is at the forefront of an increasingly complex ecosystem that continues to grow in various ways. And for the ninth year in a row, he stubbornly refused to die.

Obituary of Bitcoin proclaimed by year:

2010: 1

2011: 6

2012: 1

2013: 15

2014: 29

2015: 39

2016 : 28

2017: 93https: //t.co/ERqWe9S6Vi – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 19, 2017

While the year 2017 is well known as the year in which institutional investors began to be interested in bitcoin, it was also gaining momentum in smaller countries.

Country with the most interest in looking for Bitcoin in 2017. https://t.co/Wgrqev6fP7 pic.twitter.com/YXZpK6Oqu2 – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

Academic interest has continued to increase, which is excellent for the long-term prospects of this industry, as we continue to better understand what we are building.

Published Google Scholar articles mentioning Bitcoin:

2009: 83

2010: 136

2011: 427

2012: 737

2013: 1,570

2014: 3,790

] 2015: 4,380

2016: 5,470

2017: 5,840 (will continue to increase due to lagging registration) – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 19, 2017

Financing and Forking

Financing venture capital has continued to bring it back to fairly healthy levels, although there is more to it.

Financing venture capital of the blockchain industry:

2012: $ 2.13M

2013: $ 95.05M

2014: $ 361.53M

2015: 490, $ 48M

2016: $ 601.15M

2017: $ 554.45M – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 19, 2017

VC funding may not accelerate because new funding avenues have been opened to entrepreneurs in this area. The initial 2017 Coins Supply (ICO) boom has seen unprecedented levels of funds raised in a non-traditional form. The CoinDesk ICO tracker has recorded over $ 3.5 billion of funds raised through ICOs!

In addition to the explosion of the ICO, we also saw another type of boom: in a new kind of bitcoin fork that ended up being known as the 'air jettisoning'. 39; altcoin ".

While most of the existing crypto assets were created through Bitcoin Core software, they have historically started with a new genesis block and therefore a new distribution scheme for the tokens themselves.

You can see a fairly complete list of drops on btcdiv.com, but many of them do not even appear on the market capitalization listings because they are of little value.

Looking at the highest ranges, you can say that about $ 50 billion in value was created / raised via bitcoin forks in 2017.

As an engineer who had to deal with the fallout from the frenzy of the fork, it quickly became tiring because it was clear that the vast majority of these forks would not have sufficient value to justify spending scarce developer resources to support them.

No, @BitGo has no plans to support:

Bitcoin Platinum

Bitcoin Diamond

Bitcoin Ruby

Bitcoin Cash Plus

Bitcoin Clashic

Bitcoin Uranium

] Bitcoin Silver

Bitcoin Hot

Bitcoin God

BitcoinG

BitcoinStake

Bitcoin Blue

Bitcoin Faith

Bitcoin Pizza

Super Bitcoin

Bitcoin Lightning

UnitedBitcoin – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 15, 2017

Technical Development

At the protocol level, there was a lot of work in 2017. Bitcoin Core repository in particular was a hive of activity.

2017 reference impl comms & merges:

Bitcoin Core: 1,925

Litecoin: 1,298

IOTA: 1,166

Mono: 1,199

Bitcoin ABC: 1,104

Ethereum Classic: 895

Ethereum (geth): 833

Zcash: 491

Stellar: 453

Dash: 394

Bitcoin Classical: 374

Ripple: 271

Bitcoin Unlimited: 218

Bitconnect : 23

Dogecoin: 0 – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

Bitcoin Core Git Stats 2017: – Total number of draw requests created: 1 84 843 (~ 5 per day) – Merged extraction queries: 1 & # 39; 195 (~ 3.27 per day) – GitHub Reviews / Reviews: 21 & # 153; (~ 57.95 per day) – Clerks: 3 27 277 (~ 8.98 a day) – Contributors of Git (merged code): 161 – Contributors of GitHub: 713 – Jonas Schnelli (@_jonasschnelli_) January 10, 2018

Use of Bitcoin

Although you might think of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency, some users see it as an anchor of trust. By integrating data into the Bitcoin blockchain, other systems can acquire new properties such as inviolability and immutability.

The amount of data embedded in the blockchain has more than doubled from one year to the next, due to the growing popularity of platforms such as Blockstack, Colu and Omni.

Bitcoin OP_RETURN releases created in:

2014: 13 000

2015: 655 000

2016: 1 040 000

2017: 2 253 000https: //t.co/4dUv4bFMda pic.twitter .com / owoRrqdFmq – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

As adoption continued to increase, the size of the unspent transaction output (UTXO) was also increasing, with AKA being the state of all bitcoin owners.

The Bitcoin UTXO package went from 44M to 62M of unspent trading outflows in 2017, adding a new net UTXO every 2 seconds. pic.twitter.com/1Anf9mZshZ – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

Transaction costs are a more controversial aspect of the changing nature of bitcoin.

While rising fees have caused significant frustration for users trying to compromise on less value, an upbeat view is that network security is on the right track toward sustainability.

If the fees do not replace the overall subsidy, then the thermodynamic / computer security of the network will have to go down or perpetual inflation will have to be introduced in order to pay the miners to maintain the same level of hash power.

Transaction fees collected by Bitcoin miners jumped from $ 100,000 per day to $ 11,000,000 per day in 2017. Bitcoin network security is becoming sustainable! https://t.co/8f2uPpKT1y pic.twitter.com/u5bpkBG4hw – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 19, 2017

Bitcoin transaction fees in relation to the overall grant increased from 5.7% to 31.7% this year. If fee rates remain the same in terms of satoshis per virtual byte, Bitcoin's IT security will be self-sustaining in 6.5 years after two further hikes. https://t.co/OA3oIhHeIj pic.twitter.com/xUCMs5BB6q – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

The privacy properties of Bitcoin are still pretty daunting, but we're seeing at least an improvement in address reuse metrics.

The reuse of Bitcoin addresses (which is bad for users' privacy) continued its downward trend in 2017. Still a long way to go, since 42% of the addresses receiving the Bitcoin addresses are still in use. money is reused! https://t.co/OA3oIhHeIj pic.twitter.com/8PK5XufJbc – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

Safety and health of networks

The size of the network mesh of nodes that validate and propagate bitcoin data is again rising after stagnating for several years.

The number of publicly connectable bitcoin nodes has doubled in 2017 to 11,000! Note: It is estimated that there are more than 10 times more Bitcoin nodes unheard. https://t.co/R9VBt6kghW pic.twitter.com/Osxx7HRw3d – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

As bitcoin gains in value, minors can spend more energy to secure the system against computer attacks.

The thermodynamic safety of Bitcoin has gone from 3 exahashes per second to 14 exahashes per second in 2017. https://t.co/fm3inll7uV pic.twitter.com/1lBPIJBhvL – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

Bitcoin's network security is accelerated at an average rate of 463 GH / s ^ 2 in 2017. https://t.co/dviehgkH9H – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 19, 2017

Due to the record acceleration of Bitcoin hashrate in 2017, the working days of a minor with 100% of the current hashpower should rewrite the entire blockchain dropped from 270 to 200. https : //t.co/fm3inll7uV H / T @pwuille pic.twitter.com/UOebKERCLe – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

The technical improvements in block propagation have continued to reduce the latency at which new blocks are seen by most peers across the network. This means that nodes arrive more quickly at a consensus on the state of the blockchain, which reduces the occurrence of orphaned blocks.

Bitcoin block delay has dropped by half again this year, after halving last year. The average time to reach 50% of the nodes is now less than 1 second! https://t.co/lwJtJ818MG pic.twitter.com/jYEyOIZ9MT – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2017

Bitcoin Economics

With an exchange rate increase of more than 1,300%, the stock market capitalization of bitcoin exceeded $ 230 billion, ranking it 19th in terms of M1 money supply.

While the 30-day BTC / USD volatility was down in 2015 and 2016, it started rising again in 2017.

On average, about $ 12,000 per second was negotiated via BTC in 2017, compared to $ 2,000 per second in 2016.

https://t.co/W7qaVBd7R4 estimates (by removing probable change products) that $ 375 billion was processed through BTC in 2017, averaging nearly $ 12,000 per second. https://t.co/sQke38CutB pic.twitter.com/0iJ13wwk9b – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) January 12, 2018

Interestingly, the exit value of the average transaction (without trying to guess and subtract the change outs) seemed to increase with the exchange rate. Almost as if BTC was used as the main unit …

The value of the average bitcoin transaction has risen from $ 4,000 to $ 80,000 in 2017. https://t.co/9bbhuz8gbW pic.twitter.com/tKNhWpdWPJ – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) January 11, 2018

And indeed, we can see from the gross UTXO value that it was quite consistent in terms of BTC.

The gross value of the UTXO spent does not seem to be affected by the exchange rate and has maintained a fairly stable average of 30 BTC per second in 2017. https://t.co/kUtVc9eWTQ pic.twitter.com/VdMFGTo4sG – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) January 12, 2018

Bitcoin in 2018

In anticipation of 2018, the development of the Lightning Network is progressing well. I wrote about the promise of Lightning Network two years ago and it finally materializes, although there are still many challenges to overcome.

. @ The testernet Lightning Network analyzer from acinq_co currently displays 567 nodes with 1877 channels. https://t.co/MAPu0YU4tC pic.twitter.com/xvHCLDglcB – Jameson Lopp (@lopp) January 8, 2018

We even saw Lightning Network payments made on the main network!

BTC ATT users: TorGuard now accepts MainNet Lightning Network BTC payments. Ask for help for details! #bitcoin #lightning pic.twitter.com/6agWGvc5XM – TorGuard (@TorGuard) January 8, 2018

The next phase of development in the ecosystem will accelerate economic interactions.

Payments via second layer networks will be a leap forward, but the "atomic era" will mark the beginning of even more important innovations, such as decentralized peer-to-peer exchanges, in real time and without trust.

If you develop side chains, forkchains or altchains, you should prepare atomic swaps. Atomic age arrives, which can not be exchanged will be left behind. All that protects your trades today are "if" statements. In atomic swaps, you get real cryptographic guarantees – Alex Bosworth (@alexbosworth) January 3, 2018

I'm expecting 2018 to be another exciting year with a lot of development and drama. Stay on the lookout!

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which owns an interest in Blockstack and Colu.

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