Uptime

Uptime is the percentage of time a system is operational and available. The bitcoin network has been processing transactions more than 99.98% of the time since its launch in January 2009, and it has run without a single outage since March 2013, a record spanning well over a decade of continuous operation.

Why it matters

Bitcoin's two outages are instructive. In August 2010, the value overflow bug let someone create 184 billion bitcoins in one transaction; developers shipped a fix within hours and the network reorganized onto a corrected chain. In March 2013, a database inconsistency between software versions split the chain for about six hours before operators coordinated a rollback. Since then the network has absorbed exchange collapses, a civil war over block size, nation-state bans, and China's 2021 expulsion of roughly half its mining power without missing its ten-minute pulse. No scheduled maintenance exists because no operator exists; the system's availability emerges from tens of thousands of independent nodes on every continent.

In the gold vs bitcoin debate

Gold's uptime is perfect in the physical sense, since metal never goes offline, but the markets and institutions around it keep banker's hours, with vaults, clearing systems, and exchanges closed on nights, weekends, and holidays. Bitcoin settles final value at 3 a.m. on New Year's Day exactly as on a Tuesday afternoon. The comparison holders actually face is between an asset with no downtime and no hours, and an asset with no downtime but plenty of closed doors.