Today In Data: The Story Behind The Bitcoin Story

You’ve probably read a lot about bitcoin lately, as its value has been running a seemingly infinite victory lap this week and throughout 2017. But there’s more to bitcoin than stocks and price per coin. Here are some of the numbers behind the cryptocurrency.

182% | Increase in bitcoin value in 2017.

32| Countries where Coinbase, the world’s largest bitcoin company, has operations. The bitcoin exchange reported outages this week due to “unprecedented traffic and trading.”

10 | Transactions included in one data block of bitcoin’s Satoshi blockchain. That means transactions can only be processed 10 at a time. Because the miners who validate them can’t start on a new block until the previous one is finished, this cap has been creating a massive backlog.

50+ | Companies who signed a pact this week committing to increasing bitcoin’s block size and activating a new method of transaction verification to increase processing speed.

300 million | Registered users of Kik (though only 15 million are active monthly), who the messaging app hopes will buy in to its new cryptocurrency Kin, built on the same blockchain technology as its predecessor bitcoin.