Bitcoin (BTC) has moved $11 trillion in funds since its blockchain launched in 2009

The latest Bitcoin statistics were shown in social media by PlanB analyst on October 24. They show that the largest cryptocurrency still beats some of the competition

Bitcoin (BTC) has shifted an aggregate of $11 trillion since its blockchain went live in 2009, new figures show.

The latest Bitcoin statistics were shared on social media by analyst PlanB on Oct. 24. They show that the largest cryptocurrency still beats some of the competition in the field.

Bitcoin vs. the payment competition

The network currently processes around $9.6 billion per day. At that rate, Bitcoin would outstrip PayPal’s annual transaction volume, which stood at “only” $578 billion in 2018.

PlanB used his full node on the Bitcoin network to verify the transaction data, which is rising in value despite the bear market throughout the second half of 2019.

Can BTC overtake Visa and Mastercard within ten years?

The question then becomes whether Bitcoin will outcompete the competition in the form of market giants such as Visa and Mastercard. It certainly has the potential to do so in the future.

“In just 10 years Bitcoin has managed to (begin to) compete with the leaders in the payment systems industry. Bitcoin adoption is happening ‘exponentially’”

– recently concluded analytics firm DataLight, which examined the topic.

What is worth noting, however, is that BTC may gain dominance within a few years (decades?), but on one condition. There needs to be a clear breakthrough in the development of off-chain scaling solutions. For example, the Lightning Network is already on the market, the popularization of which is bringing new improvements. If this happens, there will be less and less activity on the Bitcoin blockchain itself, and more and more in the so-called “second layer” space. This, as cryptocurrency market commentators note, should ensure that the current block sizes meet the growing demand for BTC.

It is worth remembering that there are startups on the market that are also researching the topic of scalability, e.g., IOST. Ethereum is better off in this respect than BTC, which had a certain failure in this field during the bubble in 2017, when the network of this platform for smart contracts became clogged. The same thing happened with BTC. In the fall of 2017, sending funds within the network took up to a dozen or so hours.

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