Bitcoin (BTC) was created by Satoshi Nakamoto as an alternative to the traditional financial system. Essentially, bitcoin is an alternative form of money that you don’t need to keep with centralized intermediaries. You are therefore not dependent on the financial health of banks and Bitcoin is always available.
Bitcoin has not been offline for 10 years
For the past 10 years, Bitcoin’s network has not been offline for a single moment. On March 17, Tasigur1 came up with this special statistic on Reddit. It is almost symbolic that Bitcoin reaches this magical 10-year uptime limit at a time when the banking industry is in trouble.
A 10-year concatenated uptime means that Bitcoin has not been offline for 3,650 days. In that respect, we can say that Bitcoin is indeed an alternative system that you can rely on. The chance seems extremely small that the network will ever disappear completely.
A few minor mistakes
Since the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain in 2009, there have been two moments in history when the network has had real problems. The first notable incident happened in 2010. At the time, there was a transaction in a block that created an astronomical amount of bitcoin out of thin air. However, the bitcoin community noticed this flaw almost immediately and was able to quickly fix it.
The next problem arose in 2013. At the time, there were nodes, who were still running some outdated software, too many transactions in a block. That’s why one was born fork, or split, of the network. Fortunately, that problem was also quickly detected and resolved, so that things could continue. Since then, nothing has really gone wrong for Bitcoin.
They were mainly minor flaws in the early stages, which in themselves were not so bad because bitcoin was still a relatively small asset at the time. Now those problems, if all goes well, have been resolved and there is little chance that the network will go offline.