Author: CryptoVizArt, UkuriaOC, Glassnode; Compiler: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

December 5 , the price of Bitcoin exceeded the US$100,000 mark for the first time after 5,256 trading days, and the market value once exceeded US$2 trillion.

Since its inception, miners have generated a cumulative revenue of $71.49 billion, reflecting the network's strong security and economic incentives.

The network processed a total of 1.12 billion transactions and settled $131.25 trillion in transfers, and the entity-adjusted data more clearly reflects the real economy Activity.

The breakdown of supply held by different groups highlights the broad distribution of Bitcoin ownership, from retail investors to institutional-scale holders.

This article reviews Bitcoin’s extraordinary journey from its genesis block to breaking the $100,000 per BTC mark. Bitcoin reached this milestone for the first time on December 5.

This report explores the evolution of the Bitcoin network and its economic foundation, tracing the incredible path from zero to this groundbreaking achievement.

Bitcoin has been actively trading for 5,256 days, rising from pennies to $100,000. This journey includes 72 positive month candles (including December 2024) with an average gain of 37.4%, and 71 negative month candles with an average drawdown of -14.2%.

This reflects the fascinating balance between bull and bear markets, as well as the notorious positive skew during the worst periods of price increases.

As of December 5, a total of 19,791,952 BTC have been mined, accounting for 94.2% of the final 21 million supply cap. Bitcoin’s market capitalization also briefly topped $2.0 trillion and convincingly surpassed the market capitalization of precious metal silver (approximately $1.84 trillion).

In this extraordinary marketDuring the expansion period, investors realized a total of $1.27 trillion in profits and -$592 billion in on-chain losses (based on the difference between the acquisition price and disposal price). This results in cumulative net capital inflows (real market capitalization) reaching $750 billion and highlights the immense value that has flowed into the Bitcoin network over its lifetime.

Out of the total mined Bitcoin supply, the distribution between different wallet size groups is as follows:

<0.001 BTC:5,491 BTC (0.027%)

0.001–0.01 BTC:42,683 BTC (0.216%)

0.01–0.1 BTC:271,641 BTC (1.373%)

0.1 –1 BTC:1,077,839 BTC (5.446%)

1–10 BTC: 2,093,845 BTC (10.581%)

10–100 BTC: 4,306,780 BTC (21.761%)

100–1,000 BTC: 4,342,868 BTC (21.935%)

1,000–10,000 BTC:4,693,216 BTC (23.716%)

10,000–100,000 BTC:2,309,654 BTC (11.671%)

>100,000 BTC: 647,934 BTC (3.274%)

It is worth noting that most of these large wallets (holding 1000+ BTC) are related to exchanges, ETFs Relevant to large institutional entities such as MicroStrategy. Each of these large entities represents collective ownership from thousands to millions of customers and shareholders.

Notable total balances on December 5 included 1.8 million BTC held by exchanges (9.1% of supply ) and 1.1 million BTC managed by the US ETF (5.6% of supply), a significant growth rate since its launch on January 11, 2024. Additionally, miners (excluding Patoshi) retain a balance of 700,000 BTC (3.5% of supply), while the U.S. Treasury holds 187,000 BTC (0.9% of supply), reflecting the split in ownership between different entities Widely distributed.

These balances also highlight the increasing institutionalization and centralization of Bitcoin custody, balancing individual ownership with larger aggregate holdings that drive liquidity and market stability quantity.

Next, we will focus on the evolution of the Bitcoin network, tracing the history of Bitcoin as a system for transferring financial value since its birth process. We'll explore the milestones, technological advancements, and adoption trends that transformed Bitcoin from an experiment into a global financial phenomenon, paving the way for it to reach the $100,000 price milestone.

Since the genesis block, a total of 873,304 blocks have been mined, and the average block time of Bitcoin is 11.8 minutes on December 5, 2024 Historical price reached $100,000. While average block intervals are faster in the current generation at around 9.6 minutes due to increased hashrate, the early years started slowly as Satoshi overestimated the performance of his laptop CPU relative to the initial difficulty setting.

During the same period, network difficulty (measured in units representing the computational effort required to mine a block) increased dramatically Increase. After 418 difficulty adjustments (excluding unadjusted periods), as the security and computing power behind Bitcoin continues to increase, the network difficulty has increased to 446,331,432,498,125,300,000,000.

The difficulty adjustment goal in the Bitcoin Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus is that no matter how the network hash rate changes, approximately every A block will be mined in 10 minutes. It dynamically adjusts mining difficulty every 2016 blocks (approximately 2 weeks) to align with the target block time of 600 seconds.

When Bitcoin hit $100,000, the network hash rate had surged from 128,185 hashes/second to over 804,407,834,059,443,100,000 hashes/second. To date, miners have computed approximately 5.01 x 1028 Hashing. It is worth noting that 37% of the total calculated hashes occurred in 2024 For the entire year.

As of December 5, miners’ cumulative revenue from computing work was $71.49 billion, and the value of block rewards Based on the day of block mining, this revenue includes $67.31 billion in block subsidies from minting new coins and $4.18 billion in transaction fees paid by users. This only accounts for Bitcoin's peak market value of $2 trillion. 3.57%, which can be said to reflect the huge return on investment in security budgets

Bitcoin’s transaction volume has also seen an amazing increase. To date, the network has successfully processed 1.12 billion transactions (unfiltered)

Glassnode's entity alignment heuristic integrates transactions viewed by the same entity. Entities (e.g. ETFs or exchange). This can filter out internal transfers and provide a clearer picture of the actual economic activity happening on the chain.

Use. With our variant of the entity-adjusted total transaction count, we can filter out approximately 280 million internal transactions, leaving the total number of actual BTC economic transactions to date at 840 million.

Calculated by the dollar value of transactions at the time of confirmation, the Bitcoin network has processed a cumulative transaction volume of 131.25 trillion U.S. dollars. After applying entity adjustments, the filtered transfer volume is 11.63 trillion U.S. dollars, accounting for only 8.86% of the total.

This reflects that most transaction counts are economic in nature. However, the vast majority of transaction volume moved on-chain is likely related to large exchanges and custodial wallet management.

Bitcoin's journey to reach $100,000 per BTC not only symbolizes a price milestone, but also demonstrates its extraordinary journey from a small corner of the Internet to a globally important financial infrastructure . Since the genesis block, the network has grown by leaps and bounds, reaching a market cap of 2 Trillions of dollars, larger than silver, and settled through 1.12 billion transactionstransaction volume of $131 trillion.

The network has paid miners a cumulative value of $71.49 billion, accounting for just over 3% of its market valuation, to support its own investment costs. Reflecting an incredible return on investment costs. With a hash rate near all-time highs and a highly fragmented holder base, Bitcoin is playing an increasingly important role on the world stage.