Bitcoin - 2023 in Figures

Here is a collection of figures that put the bitcoin year 2023 into perspective. Fifteen years already.

Bitcoin 2023

As every year, the cypherpunk Jameson Lopp has given an annual summary by publishing a series of metric data about bitcoin. Here are some of them:

Countries where searches for the word “bitcoin” were most popular on Google:

1. El Salvador (the first country to make bitcoin a full-fledged currency)
2. Nigeria (the first country that attempted to impose CBDC on its population)
3. Brazil
4. Netherlands
5. Switzerland

• More than 95 million tweets containing the word “bitcoin.” Down by 9% from 2022.
• The market share of bitcoin has risen from 40% to 53%. In truth, bitcoin’s dominance is actually 75% if we set aside the stablecoins.

• The market capitalizations of the most popular hard forks such as BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) and BCH (Bitcoin Cash) represent only 0.1% and 0.5% of that of bitcoin.
• BTC transaction volume remained calm, around 4 billion dollars per day.

(This figure does not take into account the amounts corresponding to the currency returned when spending one or more utxo).

Bitcoin's daily adjusted transfer value (excluding likely change outputs) remained quiet in 2023, under $10B per day, down more than 70% from the all-time high. pic.twitter.com/nmCRfZMF40

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 22, 2023

• The hashrate increased by more than 102%. It now exceeds 500 EH/s.
• The size of the blockchain has grown by 20.6%, from 446 GB to 537 GB.
• The number of transactions on the Lightning Network has been multiplied by 12 over the past two years. The Lightning Network still processes half as many transactions compared to bitcoin.
• The number of “reachable” nodes (usually full nodes that hold all the blocks) has increased by 7%. There are now 16,446 of them.

However, there are more than 65,000 “pruned” nodes (which only contain recent blocks), showing an increase of 38% year over year!

Reachable Bitcoin node count increased by 7% during 2023 to 16,446 according to @port8333. pic.twitter.com/Btato8pAu2

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 27, 2023

• The bandwidth of nodes has doubled.

The typical “reachable” node has quite limited outbound bandwidth. The reason being that most nodes are operated at home with generally very limited capacity to send data.

Moreover, about 60% of accessible nodes run on the Tor network, which is quite slow by design. It is very possible that the end of the 2022 attacks against Tor explain the increase in bandwidth.

• The revenue earned by miners from transaction fees has increased by 400% compared to 2022. That’s an average of 2 million dollars per day. Compared to the block reward of 6.5 BTC (39 million dollars per day at the current rate).

This increase in transaction fees is caused by the ddos attack on inscriptions.

Normally, the fees represent between 2% and 4% of the miners’ revenue. These figures will double after the halving.

• Miners have collected 10 billion dollars. These billions are in addition to the 57 billion dollars earned over the previous fourteen years.

(These figures assume that miners instantly sell the mined bitcoins)

• The reuse of addresses (to be avoided) has gone from 48% in 2022 to 70% in 2023. This trend seems to coincide with the ddos attack on BRC-20 token inscriptions within bitcoin transactions.
• The percentage of SegWit transactions has increased from 85% to 97%.
• As a reminder, the SegWit soft fork changed the block size from 1 MB to 1 vMB. The v stands for “virtual.” Now, some of the transaction data (the signatures) are segregated into a separate section that benefits from a reduction.

The rule is that a byte in this new section called “witness” has a weight and cost four times less than outside. Essentially, blocks created by miners who adopted SegWit can contain twice as many transactions.

By the way, we are learning today that this was not a good idea since scammers are squatting the cheap space of the witness to lodge ordinals.

• The average value of transactions was $15 versus $90 the previous year. The reason being that many transactions are used only for inscriptions backed by ponzi schemes that fill the blocks and/or the utxo set and mempool.
• Nearly 53 million inscriptions have been logged on the blockchain, taking up 20% of the space used in blocks. These inscriptions require transactions that have earned 5,327 BTC out of a total of 23,445 BTC in transaction fees.

Inscriptions consumed ~20% of Bitcoin's block space in 2023, but they paid their fair share of fees. 22.4% of all transaction fees (5,327 BTC of 23,445 total) were paid by inscribers. pic.twitter.com/tJgzluTIT8

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) January 1, 2024

• The utxo set has grown from 83.5 million utxo to 150 million. That’s an average of two new utxo per second.

The rather indigestible expression “utxo” refers to scripts (small pieces of code) that bind an amount of bitcoin to a bitcoin address (the address is an encoding of a public key). Your wallet contains as many utxo as you have received from transactions. A utxo can be 0.0012 BTC, 1235 BTC, etc.

• The number of OP_RETURN transactions has declined by 5% in 2023 (1,860,000).

OP_RETURN allows adding 80 bytes of arbitrary data to a transaction. The peculiarity of these transactions is that the created utxo is unspendable (the BTC are then lost forever).

Therefore, these utxo do not need to be in the utxo set. In other words, it’s a good way to store data in the blockchain since nodes can prune it. OP_RETURN is used notably for timestamping data.

Ordinals sellers do not use OP_RETURN due to the lack of space which prevents storing a jpeg there. At the same time, the bitcoin blockchain isn’t a parking lot for jpegs anyway.

• The number of addresses containing more than 1 BTC has hit a new record. They number over one million.
• The time for Bitcoin transaction propagation has increased by 10%. A transaction now takes on average nearly five seconds to reach half of the nodes on the network.

This slowdown is intentional according to Jameson Lopp: “Nodes deliberately wait randomly to relay transactions in order to improve the network’s privacy.”

• The number of bitcoins on exchanges has decreased by 2%, to 2,327,590 BTC.

Most people only look at the value of bitcoin which is bound to rise in the wake of the approval of the ETF. But there are many other metrics that exist to gauge its relentless growth.