It seems that bitcoin is an extremely stable financial system, as highlighted by the cryptocurrency’s network that has maintained 100% functionality since 2013. Since the network went live on January 3, 2009, it has maintained an uptime of 99.98% experiencing only two downtimes.
Estimates provided by the cryptocurrency data website Buy Bitcoin Worldwide indicate that as of May 22, 2021, bitcoin was last down 2,994 days ago.
The first downtime was recorded in 2010 following a value overflow incident where two bitcoin addresses were erroneously allocated 92.2 billion coins. As a result, the blockchain suffered an eight-hour 27 minutes downtime. Following the downtime, a minor network update resolved the faulty transactions.
In 2013 (the second downtime), the network went down for six hours and 20 minutes after some miners rejected a block. The miners were operating a different version of the bitcoin client. However, the network went back online after miners reorganized themselves onto the same client.
Bitcoin’s stability as a finance system
Bitcoin’s uptime sustainability has comes even during significant market rallies characterized by high traffic on the network, with investors aiming to capitalize on the asset’s gains.
