Introduction

Transaction Growth

Bitcoin’s infamous block 1 was mined on January 9, 2009. The network has been live ever since and has produced 618,657 blocks up to this point. It is the longest running blockchain and therefore, I have taken a look at it from a statistical standpoint in this article to conclude, how its key metrics have developed over time.Let’s start with the transaction growth.In 2009, there were 32,716 Bitcoin transactions. That number went up by 566% in 2010, with then 185 thousand transactions. 2011 was the first year that saw over 1 million Bitcoin transactions with 1.91 million transactions. The transaction growth continued in 2012, with 8.44 million yearly transactions. The growth rate slowed down a bit from 2013 on, but was still with 19.7 million transaction 2.3 times higher than the year before.Even in the bear market of 2014, the number of Bitcoin transactions continued to grow – the year saw 25.3 million transactions. Transaction growth accelerated again in 2015, which had with 45.7 million transactions 1.8 times as many as 2014. In 2016, transaction numbers went up to 82.6 million, while Bitcoin broke the mark of 100 million yearly transactions in 2017 with 104.1 million transactions. The bear market of 2018 led for the first time in Bitcoin’s history to a lower number of transactions compared to the year before with “only” 81.4 million transactions. However, 2019 saw a new all-time high for transactions with 119.8 million yearly Bitcoin transactions.A closer look at the transaction numbers per half-year over time offers additional insights. We can see, that the transaction numbers varied quite a lot between different years, but didn’t change that much if you look at the difference between the first and the second half of a year. The highest transaction number per half-year has happened in the first half of 2019 with 60.9 million transactions, followed by 58.8 million transactions in the second half of 2019. The first half of 2018 saw the lowest number of Bitcoin transactions in the last four years with just 37.6 million transactions. The following chart visualizes the transaction numbers: