Bitcoin is 18 years old: 5 figures that show how it has changed

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Eighteen years old and all his teeth. On October 31, 2008 at 2:10 p.m. New York time, a certain Satoshi Nakamoto posted nine pages on a cryptographers' mailing list. This Saturday, October 31, the baby weighs 1.6 trillion dollars and fills BlackRock's ETFs. We had already celebrated fifteen candles at the time of the first ETFs.

So what does a major Bitcoin look like? Not to the teenager who lost 93% of his value between two growing pains. Here are five figures dated October 28 that tell the story of what has changed.

Let's start with the number that annoys the undertakers. Between the peak of October 2025 and the trough of June 30, 2026, bitcoin lost 53%. A carnage on the scale of an A booklet, a nap on the scale of its own past, which had collapsed by 93%, 85%, 84% then 77% during previous cycles.

Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy, speaks in his October 26 note of the “shallowest bear market ever recorded” and dates its end to June. The MVRV ratio, which compares the market price to the average purchase price of coins in circulation, bottomed at 1.10. During the three previous lows, it had fallen to 0.56, 0.69 and 0.75, in other words below the acquisition cost of the entire market.

You will have understood, the kid takes hits better. And the Fear & Greed barometer fell to 5 in February 2026, its rock bottom, before rising to 15 at the low point in June. On October 28, the index returned to around 50, in the neutral zone.

Second digit, the most arithmetic. According to CoinGecko, 20.105 million bitcoins were circulating as of October 28 out of the 21 million provided for by the code, or 95.7% of the final supply. There are fewer than 900,000 pieces left to be produced, and they will be released slowly until the next century.

You know the mechanism. Every 210,000 blocks, the miners' reward is halved, from 50 BTC in 2009 to 3.125 BTC since April 2024. The next halving, expected around 2028, will bring it down to 1.5625 BTC per block, according to the milestone dates that we keep up to date.

Let us judge: in October 2009, a site estimated the first bitcoin at $0.00076 based on the cost of electricity. On October 28, 2026, the same asset was trading around $80,400, 36% below its record of $126,080 reached a year earlier.

Third number, and there you have to take out the calculator. On October 27, mempool.space measured a hashrate of 1.084 zettahashes per second, or 1.084 trillion trillion attempts every second to find the next block. The mining difficulty was close to 140,580 billion.

Machine-translated from French