Bitcoin White Paper 11th Anniversary! Cumulative Fees Officially Exceed 1 Billion USD

Today, the Bitcoin White Paper, authored by the mysterious figure Satoshi Nakamoto, turns 11 years old; that is, 11 years ago today, Nakamoto published the first public-facing document outlining a decentralized ledger and currency system he called "Bitcoin."

Coincidentally, on the same day, the Bitcoin blockchain reached a major milestone.

According to Yassine Elmandjra, crypto analyst at market research/fund management firm ARK Invest, the Bitcoin network has now paid out $1 billion worth of fees. In short, the total fees for all Bitcoin transactions so far have reached $1 billion. That's crazy!

What’s even more remarkable about this number is that it’s all done through a decentralized system, with fees distributed to a global group of miners who voluntarily maintain the blockchain in exchange for monetary rewards.

“It’s official! The Bitcoin network’s cumulative fee revenue has exceeded $1 billion.”

Tuur Demeester, founding partner at Adamant Capital, put this statistic best when he wrote on Twitter today that it essentially means “$1 billion to fund the world’s most powerful firewall.”

Bitcoin is not ready as a consumer payment method

While Bitcoin is clearly already being used, the above statistics suggest it is not yet ready for adoption as a consumer payment method.

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square (two companies with relatively large cryptocurrency users), believes that Bitcoin is not ready for mass adoption. He said it is not “ready as a currency,” seemingly referring to the base-layer processing speed of 7 transactions per second, which pales in comparison to (centralized) PayPal, Visa, etc. Dorsey added:

“The peaks and valleys that Bitcoin has have made it like an investment asset, comparable to gold. What we need to do is make it easier to use and use as money, but we’re not there yet.”

Dorsey’s comments were backed up by Samson Mow, chief strategy officer at Blockstream. He said that seeing that Bitcoin takes an average of 10 minutes to process transactions at the base layer, and sometimes takes more than 3 hours, Bitcoin is not yet ready for use in a global currency environment. “You don’t design a payment system that takes an average of 10 minutes to settle,” he said.

However, solutions are in the works. Bakkt, a bitcoin trading platform owned by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, will launch a payment application that can be used to spend cryptocurrency at Starbucks. It is not clear how Bitcoin fits into this scenario, but the company is probably making Bitcoin a focus.