More than 12 years after the bitcoin network came into existence with the creation of genesis block, bitcoin miners reached a new milestone of producing the 700,000th block on Sep 11, marking a major milestone for a network whose detractors claim it has stalled 428 times since 2009. The phase bitcoin obituary is colloquially used to refer to the number of times Bitcoin has been declared to be worthless or dead in articles, news, or blogs, etc.
Block after block, Bitcoin highlights the power of programmable monetary policy even as calls for its death grow louder. With the bitcoin frenzy continuing to attract investors, the virtual currency took less than two years to reach the latest milestone from the previous 600,000-mark on October 18, 2019, which also took less than two years from the 500,000th block mined on December 19, 2017. Back on December 29, 2010, Bitcoin reached its 100,000th block. The historic 700,000th block was mined by an unknown miner who earned a total Bitcoin block reward of $287,540.
What is a Bitcoin Block?
Bitcoin Blocks are files where data pertaining to the Bitcoin network are permanently recorded. A block records some or all of the most recent Bitcoin transactions that have not yet entered any prior blocks. Thus, a block is like a page of a ledger or record book. The bitcoin block size of a block on bitcoin’s blockchain was limited to 1 MB. The limitation on size and time required to generate a block added another layer of security on bitcoin’s blockchain.
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On average, new blocks are generated every ten minutes, though production time is impacted by mining difficulty. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is adjusted roughly every two weeks, a process that resets how hard it is for miners to mine the digital asset. At the current pace of block production, the final Bitcoin will be mined around the year 2140.
Crypto Twitter celebrated the milestone by quoting the late Hal Finney, one of Bitcoin’s early pioneers and a prime candidate for being Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the technology. Finney passed away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, in 2014.
