Bitcoin is Stable
Despite its volatile exchange rates with fiat currencies, bitcoin is the most stable monetary network available.
Bitcoin keeps processing transactions and hashing out blocks.
Every day, there are roughly 144 blocks produced on the bitcoin network. Every single new block gets added roughly every 10 minutes to the bitcoin transaction history.
When the network started on January 3rd, 2009, its first block had a reward of 50 BTC. In other words, the circulating supply was only 50 BTC after the first block. After the second block was created, another 50 BTC were issued adding to a total of 100 BTC of circulating supply.
The issuance of 50 BTC per block continued for the first 210,000 blocks.
Every 210,000 blocks, which is roughly 4 years, the bitcoin issuance rate is cut in half.
In 2009 and until 2012, the bitcoin issuance was 50 BTC per block.
In 2012, the bitcoin issuance was cut in half down to 25 BTC per block.
In 2016, it was halved again down to 12.5 BTC per block.
In 2020, down to 6.25 BTC per block.
In 2024, as expected, the block reward will go down to 3.125 BTC per block.
The bitcoin issuance halving will keep going every 4 years until there is nothing left to cut. This is how the limit on the supply of bitcoins is set to 21 million.
To make sure the bitcoin issuance rate stays predictable, the network adjusts the difficulty to find or mine blocks every 2,016 blocks, roughly 2 weeks.
Every 2 weeks, the bitcoin network takes a look at the average time it takes to mine a block. If the average time is lower than 10 minutes, it adjusts the difficulty upwards making it harder to find a new block. If the average time is lower than 10 minutes, it lowers the difficulty to make it easier to find a new block.
With difficulty adjustment, the average block time is always expected to revert back to 10 minutes, on average.
With an average block time of 10 minutes, the bitcoin issuance rate is predictable.
With a block reward halving every 4 years, the bitcoin issuance is cut in half repeatedly until there is no more block reward.
Due to these two rules, bitcoin is predictably and absolutely scarce.
But most importantly, bitcoin is stable, creating blocks and processing transactions regularly.
There is no uncertainty in bitcoin, and with as a distributed system it has had no down time since 2013, with an overall uptime of 99.9878688483%. Unprecedented for the fiat banking rails.
Bitcoin is not volatile. Fiat is. Bitcoin is stable.