Bitcoin has been running for more than fifteen years. Whatever your view of it, it is now a long‑lived, globally used system.
This page looks at global Bitcoin adoption through various data sources. Network metrics come from my own personal Bitcoin node, business adoption from OpenStreetMap data, and price from public market APIs such as CoinGecko. Most inputs are open data, and the entire pipeline is built with free and open‑source software and is fully reproducible. The code used to produce this data is available here.
For each chart, you can change the period with the drop‑down, switch between linear and log scales, and zoom into regions of interest using the chart tools.
Global Bitcoin Business Growth
The table below shows how the number of businesses that accept Bitcoin as payment has changed over time both worldwide and by country. The accompanying chart plots the cumulative sum of Bitcoin‑accepting businesses for the countries selected in the table. The data is sourced from OpenStreetMap.
Bitcoin transaction fees (historical distribution)
This chart shows historical Bitcoin transaction fees, split into percentiles for each day based on confirmed transactions.
This gives a historical record of the Bitcoin fee market, which is useful for spotting periods of congestion and for identifying times when fees were low.
Percentiles are shown instead of a single average because they show the full spread of fees paid. A single average can be misleading: a small number of very high‑fee transactions can skew the results.
Block time and difficulty adjustments
This chart shows block confirmation time as a 14-day rolling average in minutes, alongside percent change in mining difficulty.
Difficulty adjusts roughly every two weeks (every 2016 blocks) to keep average block time close to the 10‑minute target. Hashrate fluctuates as miners come online or shut down, which can push block times above or below the target. The difficulty adjustment responds by making mining harder or easier so block production trends back toward the target.
In this chart, you can see spikes in average block time are typically followed by a difficulty adjustment in the opposite direction. After the adjustment, block times tend to drift back toward the 10‑minute target. It almost looks as if the bars are pulling the line in the opposite direction.
Hashrate and difficulty
The next chart tracks the network’s estimated hashrate and the mining difficulty over time, plus a 28‑day moving average for both. Hashrate is a rough measure of how much computational power is pointed at the Bitcoin network. Difficulty is the protocol’s response: it adjusts every ~2 weeks to keep blocks arriving roughly every 10 minutes.
This chart is quite important for the Bitcoin network, as it’s a proxy for network security. A higher hashrate make attacks more expensive, thus securing the network.
Estimated Miner revenue (USD)
This chart shows an estimate of what all miners earn each day in dollar terms. It splits revenue into:
- Subsidy (USD) – value of the newly created bitcoin (block subsidy)
- Tx fees (USD) – total transaction fees paid that day
- Total revenue (USD) – subsidy plus fees
- Current block subsidy - current block subsidy in BTC
The subsidy and fees are stacked as areas, with a line showing the total. On‑chain data comes from my node and the USD values use average daily prices from several sources including CoinGecko.
You can see how sensitive miners are to price moves and Bitcoin halvings (see April 2024 or the beginning of 2019). A drop in Bitcoin price or the subsidy cutting in half can hit revenue immediately. However, historical trends show that overall revenue in dollar terms tends to recover and grow over time.
Bitcoin price (USD)
The final chart is simply the daily Bitcoin price in USD, using data from several sources including CoinGecko.
Price data goes back to July 2010 ($0.1 per Bitcoin!).
Current Price: