Still Running: Bitcoin at 18

This week's Ledger is a short video for a birthday. Sound on is better, but it works with sound off.

Eighteen years ago today, on October 31, 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine page paper. The network it described has added a new block about every ten minutes ever since, through exchange collapses, a crackdown, a record wipeout and a bug that minted 184 billion coins before it was fixed.

We told the story the way we tell any story: with the data. The counters at the top track the block, the coins mined and the price as the years go by, and the timeline along the bottom fills in with every moment. Every date and number on the cards was checked against the public record before it went in; the price counter is approximate (daily averages, sampled weekly).

The four halvings get the spotlight: about every four years, the new coins per block get cut in half, and it has happened right on schedule every time. That part never changed.

Same tools we use every day, just a different data set.

Music: “Action Dark Trailer” by ArctSound and “Dark Cinematic Trailer” by OpenMindAudio, via Pixabay. Animated in code with Claude Code. Block and price data from mempool.space and blockchain.com; coins mined calculated from the issuance schedule.