Bitcoin Facts Infographics

THE C TOP COINS BITCOIN FACTS Bitcoin, Demystified Bitcoin has changed how the world views money forever. Just when you think you've probably known everything there is to know about this controversial coin, we're here to prove that there's still a lot more to learn. It's difficult to measure Bitcoin's popularity. According to data from Statista, around 7% of Americans saw cryptocurrency as a legitimate financial product/ investment. The numbers are higher for Australians, at around 9%. Someone posts about Bitcoin three seconds. every According to comparison website Finder, there's a post about Bitcoin on social media every three seconds. Social media attention might have helped get Bitcoin to where it is right now, especially considering the fact that more and more people treat social media updates as news. To give you a snapshot, The Pew Research Center said that the number could be as high as 3 of American adults! Meet the Whales Whales are the bigwigs -- entities that hold large amounts of Bitcoin. According to Finder AU, the largest holding in a single Bitcoin address is 255,000 BTC (around $2.1B). Around 13% of all Bitcoin is stored in just around 100 whale accounts. "The big players can easily move the price because the Bitcoin trading market is very thin... any one of them could crash it." - David Gerard "Institutions and whales were able to buy dips and oftentimes sell when prices went up. That left the majority of the retail investors scrambling to chase the rally." Meet the Ghosts Over its 10-year run, a lot of Bitcoin owners have lost their private keys, or have passed away without granting anyone else access to their wallets. These are known as "ghost accounts." It's estimated that about 20% of all existing Bitcoins are locked inside ghost addresses, presumably forever. Sometimes, ghosts come back and haunt the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. In May 2020, a ghost address containing coins mined in 2009 suddenly came back to life and started moving $300,000 worth of BTC in different wallets. BOO! Meet the Miners Bitcoin is finite, and that's exactly what makes it valuable. There's only 21 million BTC in existence. After the last Bitcoin has been mined, there won't be any more. As the amount of Bitcoin left to be mined gets smaller, the reward for miners is halved every four years or so until the rewards reach 1 satoshi (0.00000001 BTC). Currently, around 18.5 million BTC have been mined. The Expense of Mining Setting up a Bitcoin mining rig can set you back around $700 (from the most basic graphic cards) up to around $10,000. Mining Bitcoin consumes a lot of electricity as well: according to research done by the University of Cambridge, Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as the whole of Switzerland! The Environmental Cost of Mining According to the Joule Journal published in June 2019, the annual CO2 emissions from Bitcoin mining has B been estimated to be around 37 million tons. Bitcoin in the Real World Bitcoin's been redefining how the world moves money for the past 11 years. Some of the world's biggest companies now accept Bitcoin as payment, including, but not limited to: • Virgin Mobile •Expedia • Twitch • Wikipedia •Microsoft •AT&T •The Home Depot •Starbucks •KFC Bitcoin and the World In various countries in Africa, Bitcoin has managed to shield small businesses from the insane transaction fees that come with having to exchange money. Latin Americans have used Bitcoins and other stablecoins to shield their income and savings from worsening economic conditions due to civil unrest. To Summarize Though there are certain inequalities are embedded within the lines of Bitcoin's code, and mining it is growing more and more uneconomical in a world that's already struggling to deal with environmental issues, Bitcoin has given people an accessible, private way to manage their finances. It has also managed to shield people in economically vulnerable places. For better or worse, one thing's for sure: Bitcoin has undeniably, irrevocably changed the world.