Bitcoin (BTC) as a network has moved $11 trillion in funds since its blockchain launched in 2009, according to new calculations.
The latest Bitcoin statistics were shown in social media by PlanB analyst on October 24. They show that the largest cryptocurrency still beats some of the competition in this field.
Bitcoin and the competition in the payment market
The network currently processes about $9.6 billion per day. At that value, Bitcoin exceeds PayPal’s annual transaction volume, which was “only” $578 billion in 2018.
PlanB used its full node on the Bitcoin network to verify transaction data, and it turns out that the values are rising, despite the bear market in the second half of 2019.
Can BTC overtake Visa and Mastercard within ten years?
The question then arises whether Bitcoin will completely outclass the competition in the form of such market giants as Visa and MasterCard. It certainly has a chance to do so in the future.
“In just 10 years, Bitcoin has managed to (start) competing with the leaders in the payment system industry. Bitcoin’s development is taking place “exponentially”
– recently concluded the analytical company DataLight, which researched this topic.
What is worth emphasizing, however, is that BTC may gain dominance within a few years (decades?), but on one condition. There must be a clear breakthrough in the development of off-chain scaling solutions. For example, the Lightning Network is already on the market, the popularization of which is bringing new progress. If this happens, there will be less and less activity in the Bitcoin blockchain, and more and more in the so-called “second layer” space. This, as cryptocurrency market commentators note, should ensure that current block sizes meet the growing demand for BTC.
It is worth remembering that there are startups on the market that are also researching the topic of scalability, e.g. IOST. Ethereum is better in this respect than BTC, which had a certain failure in this field during the bubble in 2017, when the network of this platform for smart contracts became clogged. The same thing happened with BTC. In the fall of 2017, sending funds within the network took up to a dozen or so hours.
