Michael Saylor Celebrates Bitcoin’s 1 Billionth Transaction

It took Bitcoin more than four years to add half a billion transactions

Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy’s executive chairman, has taken to the X social media network to celebrate Bitcoin’s latest milestone: one billion transactions.

The transaction was recorded in block 842,241 on May 5. at 21:34 UTC, according to the data provided by the Clark Moody dashboard. 

Roughly 15.5 million transactions have been recorded over the past 30 days. 

The very first Bitcoin transaction took place on Jan. 12, 2009, between Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and the late cypherpunk Hal Finney. Finney received 10 coins as a test. Shortly after that, Finney carried out an email conversation with the mysterious Bitcoin founder in order to report some bugs.    

Finney went on to run Bitcoin for some time and later turned it off because it made his computer run hot. The computer programmer was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease shortly after becoming the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction. 

After tinkering with Bitcoin and walking away from it, he was surprised to find out that it actually had monetary value in late 2010. The network ended up surpassing one million transactions in July 2011. Back then, the largest cryptocurrency was trading at roughly $15.     

Finney, who is one of the leading Satoshi candidates, passed away in 2014 after his battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

In late 2015, Bitcoin recorded 100 million transactions, which was a sign of growing adoption. The largest cryptocurrency was trading at roughly $455. In February 2020, the network topped half a billion transactions when the cryptocurrency was trading just above the $10,000 level.

Saylor, one of the most prominent Bitcoin advocates, predicted that the market value of the flagship cryptocurrency could reach $100 trillion.

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