Bitcoin's blockchain size was close to reaching 5450 gigabytes in 2024, as the database saw exponential growth by nearly one gigabyte every few days. The Bitcoin blockchain contains a continuously growing and tamper-evident list of all Bitcoin transactions and records since its initial release in January 2009. Bitcoin has a set limit of 21 million coins, the last of which will be mined around 2140, according to a forecast made in 2017. Bitcoin mining: A somewhat uncharted world Despite interest in the topic, there are few accurate figures on how big Bitcoin mining is on a country-by-country basis. Bitcoin's design philosophy is at the heart of this. Created out of protest against governments and central banks, Bitcoin's blockchain effectively hides both the country of origin and the destination country within a (mining) transaction. Research involving IP addresses placed the United States as the world's most Bitcoin mining country in 2022 - but the source admits IP addresses can easily be manipulated using VPN. Note that mining figures are different from figures on Bitcoin trading: Africa and Latin America were more interested in buying and selling BTC than some of the world's developed economies. Bitcoin developments Bitcoin's trade volume slowed in the second quarter of 2023, after hitting a noticeable growth at the beginning of the year. The coin outperformed most of the market. Some attribute this to the announcement in June 203 that BlackRock filed for a Bitcoin ETF. This iShares Bitcoin Trust was to use Coinbase Custody as its custodian. Regulators in the United States had not yet approved any applications for spot ETFs on Bitcoin.

Dataset Construction This dataset captures the temporal network of Bitcoin (BTC) flow exchanged between entities at the finest time resolution in UNIX timestamp. Its construction is based on the blockchain covering the period from January, 3rd of 2009 to January the 25th of 2021. The blockchain extraction has been made using bitcoin-etl (https://github.com/blockchain-etl/bitcoin-etl) Python package. The entity-entity network is built by aggregating Bitcoin addresses using the common-input heuristic [1] as well as popular Bitcoin users' addresses provided by https://www.walletexplorer.com/ [1] M. Harrigan and C. Fretter, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Address Clustering," 2016 Intl IEEE Conferences on Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Advanced and Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing and Communications, Cloud and Big Data Computing, Internet of People, and Smart World Congress (UIC/ATC/ScalCom/CBDCom/IoP/SmartWorld), Toulouse, France, 2016, pp. 368-373, doi: 10.1109/UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld.2016.0071.keywords: {Online banking;Merging;Protocols;Upper bound;Bipartite graph;Electronic mail;Size measurement;bitcoin;cryptocurrency;blockchain}, Dataset Description Bitcoin Activity Temporal Coverage: From 03 January 2009 to 25 January 2021 Overview: This dataset provides a comprehensive representation of Bitcoin exchanges between entities over a significant temporal span, spanning from the inception of Bitcoin to recent years. It encompasses various temporal resolutions and representations to facilitate Bitcoin transaction network analysis in the context of temporal graphs. Every dates have been retrieved from bloc UNIX timestamp and GMT timezone. Contents: The dataset is distributed across three compressed archives: All data are stored in the Apache Parquet file format, a columnar storage format optimized for analytical queries. It can be used with pyspark Python package. orbitaal-stream_graph.tar.gz: The root directory is STREAM_GRAPH/ Contains a stream graph representation of Bitcoin exchanges at the finest temporal scale, corresponding to the validation time of each block (averaging approximately 10 minutes). The stream graph is divided into 13 files, one for each year Files format is parquet Name format is orbitaal-stream_graph-date-[YYYY]-file-id-[ID].snappy.parquet, where [YYYY] stands for the corresponding year and [ID] is an integer from 1 to N (number of files here) such as sorting in increasing [ID] ordering is similar to sort by increasing year ordering These files are in the subdirectory STREAM_GRAPH/EDGES/ orbitaal-snapshot-all.tar.gz: The root directory is SNAPSHOT/ Contains the snapshot network representing all transactions aggregated over the whole dataset period (from Jan. 2009 to Jan. 2021). Files format is parquet Name format is orbitaal-snapshot-all.snappy.parquet. These files are in the subdirectory SNAPSHOT/EDGES/ALL/ orbitaal-snapshot-year.tar.gz: The root directory is SNAPSHOT/ Contains the yearly resolution of snapshot networks Files format is parquet Name format is orbitaal-snapshot-date-[YYYY]-file-id-[ID].snappy.parquet, where [YYYY] stands for the corresponding year and [ID] is an integer from 1 to N (number of files here) such as sorting in increasing [ID] ordering is similar to sort by increasing year ordering These files are in the subdirectory SNAPSHOT/EDGES/year/ orbitaal-snapshot-month.tar.gz: The root directory is SNAPSHOT/ Contains the monthly resoluted snapshot networks Files format is parquet Name format is orbitaal-snapshot-date-[YYYY]-[MM]-file-id-[ID].snappy.parquet, where [YYYY] and [MM] stands for the corresponding year and month, and [ID] is an integer from 1 to N (number of files here) such as sorting in increasing [ID] ordering is similar to sort by increasing year and month ordering These files are in the subdirectory SNAPSHOT/EDGES/month/ orbitaal-snapshot-day.tar.gz: The root directory is SNAPSHOT/ Contains the daily resoluted snapshot networks Files format is parquet Name format is orbitaal-snapshot-date-[YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]-file-id-[ID].snappy.parquet, where [YYYY], [MM], and [DD] stand for the corresponding year, month, and day, and [ID] is an integer from 1 to N (number of files here) such as sorting in increasing [ID] ordering is similar to sort by increasing year, month, and day ordering These files are in the subdirectory SNAPSHOT/EDGES/day/ orbitaal-snapshot-hour.tar.gz: The root directory is SNAPSHOT/ Contains the hourly resoluted snapshot networks Files format is parquet Name format is orbitaal-snapshot-date-[YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]-[hh]-file-id-[ID].snappy.parquet, where [YYYY], [MM], [DD], and [hh] stand for the corresponding year, month, day, and hour, and [ID] is an integer from 1 to N (number of files here) such as sorting in increasing [ID] ordering is similar to sort by increasing year, month, day and hour ordering These files are in the subdirectory SNAPSHOT/EDGES/hour/ orbitaal-nodetable.tar.gz: The root directory is NODE_TABLE/ Contains two files in parquet format, the first one gives information related to nodes present in stream graphs and snapshots such as period of activity and associated global Bitcoin balance, and the other one contains the list of all associated Bitcoin addresses. Small samples in CSV format orbitaal-stream_graph-2016_07_08.csv and orbitaal-stream_graph-2016_07_09.csv These two CSV files are related to stream graph representations of an halvening happening in 2016.

Bitcoin's transaction volume was at its highest in December 2023, when the network processed over 724,000 coins on the same day. Bitcoin generally has a higher transaction activity than other cryptocurrencies, except Ethereum. This cryptocurrency is often processed more than one million times per day. Note that the transaction volume here refers to transactions registered within the Bitcoin blockchain. It should not be confused with Bitcoin's 24-hour trade volume, a metric associated with crypto exchanges. The more Bitcoin transactions, the more it is used in B2C payments? A Bitcoin transaction recorded in the blockchain can be any transaction, including B2C but also P2P. While it is possible to see in the blockchain which address sent Bitcoin to whom, details on who this person is and where they are from are often missing. Bitcoin was designed to go against monetary authorities and prides itself on being anonymous. An important argument against Bitcoin replacing cash or cards in payments is that the cryptocurrency was not allowed for such a task: Bitcoin ranks among the slowest cryptocurrencies in terms of transaction speed. Are cryptocurrencies taking over payments? Cryptocurrency payments are set to grow at a CAGR of nearly 17 percent between 2022 and 2029, although the market is relatively small. The forecast is according to a market estimate made in early 2023, based on various conditions and sources available at that time. Research across 40 countries during the same time suggested that the market share of cryptocurrency in e-commerce transactions was "less than one percent" in all surveyed countries, with predictions being this would not change in the future.