The world’s largest cryptocurrency reached a milestone on Monday, Sept. 12 \u2014 Bitcoin (BTC<\/a>) celebrated 5,000 days of uptime. The network has functioned almost without a hiccup for 13.69 years. <\/p>\n In Bitcoin speak, the blockchain has been online, confirming<\/a> a valid block of transactions every 10 minutes, on average, for 753,782 blocks (5,000 days). Plus, 3,464 days have passed<\/a>\u00a0since\u00a0the last downtime incident.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first Bitcoin block was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto on Jan. 3, 2009. Bitcoin spent 99.9% of the year online, confirming valid blocks on average every 10 minutes until what is known as the\u00a0Value Overflow Incident.<\/a>\u00a0The incident refers<\/a> to the creation of a \u201cstrange block,\u201d block 74,638, which resulted in the creation of billions more Bitcoin. Five hours later, during block 74,691, the blockchain was soft-forked, and nodes reached consensus.<\/p>\n In 2013, Bitcoin software split, and the chain forked into two. The blockchain was down for 6 hours and 20 minutes causing a price drop of more than 23%, hitting lows of $37. Combining the downtime of the Bitcoin network between 2010 and 2013 creates roughly 0.01% of the total time.<\/p>\n Bitcoin influencers (Bitfluencers?) were<\/a> quick to honor<\/a> the occasion with celebratory boating accidents, events\u00a0in which Bitcoiners lose their private keys<\/a>. Others\u00a0expressed their gratitude for the anonymous creator of the protocol:<\/p>\n 5000 days of #Bitcoin<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/oTdbmJG0Tk<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Lina Seiche (@LinaSeiche) September 11, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Popular cryptocurrencies such as Solana (SOL<\/a>) or Ether (ETH<\/a>) cannot currently compete with the uptime nor decentralization for which Bitcoin is known. Solana regularly experiences outages, labeled a\u00a0“curse” to the network<\/a>\u00a0by its cofounder,\u00a0while Ethereum\u2019s creation was the result of a hard fork<\/a>. <\/p>\n Related:\u00a0The Fed, the Merge and $22K BTC \u2014 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum\u2019s cofounder,\u00a0boasted<\/a> in 2020 that \u201cYou can be net profitable with as little as 60% uptime.\u201d Nonetheless, Bitcoin is still some way from reaching Nakamoto\u2019s promise of a peer-to-peer cash system that removes third parties:\u00a0Scaling payments on layer-2 are an uphill battle.<\/a> <\/p>\n In the meantime, Bitcoin will have to settle for being the most secure, most decentralized and most popular cryptocurrency solution.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![](\"https:\/\/s3.cointelegraph.com\/uploads\/2022-09\/0ee6e018-04f9-4b43-b17c-c3b0c7f3d064.png\")
\n