3,964 days - nearly 11 years - have passed since the last downtime in the Bitcoin network. This puts the so-called uptime at 99.98 percent. This makes the BTC blockchain one of the most reliable networks of all time.

Dan Held compares uptime with Amazon, Facebook or Google. The Bitcoin veteran does not give a percentage value. If it is up to some Bitcoiners on Reddit, the comparison is wrong anyway. The difference with payment networks such as VISA, Mastercard or AMEX is much more interesting. According to Held, these service providers' networks fail on average once a year.

Bitcoin uptime gets better every year I Source: Bitcoinuptime.org

Bitcoin beats U.S. dollar and altcoins

A comparison with the world's reserve currency, the U.S. dollar, is also interesting. According to a post on Reddit, the U.S. dollar has an uptime of 99.984 percent, less than Bitcoin. The values are based on historical context:

In 1775, the Continental Congress of the United States authorized the issuance of Continental Currency, the first U.S. currency denominated in dollars. By May 1781, these Continentals had lost so much value that they no longer circulated as a means of payment. On July 6, 1785, the Continental Congress approved the introduction of a new version of the U.S. currency, the U.S. dollar.

Theoretically, therefore, the US dollar was inactive for four of the 249 years. However, there is no official measurement data on this.

The comparison with altcoins, mainly Solana, is more relevant. The "fastest blockchain in the world" has often failed. Critics see the reason for the system's instability in a design problem with the blockchain.

Bitcoin failed in 2010 and 2013

The first time Bitcoin failed was a year and a half after its launch. On August 15, 2010, a transaction was discovered in block 74638 that created 184.4 billion BTC for three addresses. Two received 92.2 billion BTC each, the " block finder" received another 0.01 BTC. The reason: an error in the code.

According to conversations on the Bitcointalk forum, it was likely Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto who fixed the problem. Within five hours of the discovery, a new client version was released with a rule change to reject transactions with so-called spend overflow. This led to a soft fork of the blockchain. The incident lasted eight hours and 27 minutes: During this time, the Bitcoin network was inactive.

The last time Bitcoin went down was in 2013. Because miners were using a different client version, nodes rejected the blocks produced. This led to a temporary fork of the blockchain at block height 252,450, which was resolved after six hours and 20 minutes.