The Bitcoin Ecosystem [Infographic]

The Bitcoin Magazine has developed an infographic demonstrating how the bitcoin has been developing since its launch six years ago. Created in partnership with Bitpay, the “Bitcoin City” shows the main areas of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and some of the key bitcoin companies.

The bitcoin network was released on January 3, 2009, when the first block in the blockchain, a distributed ledger technology behind bitcoin, was mined by its founder Satoshi Nakamoto.

Like many other technologies, bitcoin had come a long way until it reached a widespread adoption by financial companies across the world. In the meantime, such events as the closure of the Silk Road black marketplace and the collapse of the Mt. Gox exchange, negatively affected the digital currency. Following these cases, early advocates of the technology lost millions of dollars in digital currency.

However, the industry is still growing, with bitcoin being widely used for microtransactions, international remittances, smart contracts, securities trading and machine-to-machine transactions.

While the scale of bitcoin mining is steadily rising, the hardware is growing in power. Currently, miners are establishing multi-megawatt data centers equipped with high-powered computers. In 2014, the bitcoin network hashrate amounted to just 10 million GH/s, whilst now it totals 504 million GH/s. Within the same time period, the bitcoin network daily capacity increased from 50,000 transactions to 170,000 transactions.

Meanwhile, the number of merchants accepting payments in virtual currency is growing too. In mid-year 2015, there were 100,000 merchants who integrated bitcoin, while in mid-2014 the number of traders totaled 65,000.

This August, bitcoin company, BitPay, processed about 70,000 transactions, what shows that cryptocurrency as a mean of payment is steadily growing in popularity.

During the current year, bitcoin firms raised over $1 billion in funding, what shows that venture capital investment in the sector is rapidly growing. In comparison, last year bitcoin startups raised around $314.7 million.

The “Bitcoin City” inforgraphic features some of the major industry players, which discuss the huge potential of the digital currency in the near future.

Author Polina Chernykh

Polina is an undergraduate student at Belarusian State Economic University (BSEU) where she is studying at the faculty of International Business Communication for a degree specializing in Intercultural Communication. In her spare time she enjoys drawing, music and travelling.