A simple four-signal check from Public Piggy Bank. We ignore price and look only at what is happening inside the Bitcoin network: security, usage, and participation. Every value compares today vs the past 30 days, 1 year and All Time.
What it is: The total combined work miners are doing every second. It’s like the horsepower behind Bitcoin’s security engine.
• Every miner points real-world energy (electricity + hardware) at the network. The sum of all that work is the hashrate.
• Higher hashrate means an attacker needs more hardware, more energy, and more money to try anything dishonest.
Why it matters: If hashrate trends up over years, the world is voting with energy that Bitcoin is worth defending.
• Miners don’t work for free. If the network isn’t valuable, they shut off machines and hashrate falls.
How it connects: Difficulty follows hashrate. When hashrate rises enough, the protocol makes mining harder so blocks stay ~10 minutes apart.
How to read the trend: Zooming out (1 year or all time) helps you see if short dips are just noise in a long, rising security curve.
What it is: A measure of how hard it is to find a valid block. The higher it is, the harder each “lottery ticket” needs to work.
• Bitcoin retargets difficulty about every 2 weeks (2,016 blocks) based on how quickly the last blocks were mined.
• If miners came in stronger and blocks were too fast, difficulty increases. If miners dropped off and blocks were slow, it decreases.
Why it matters: Difficulty is the protocol’s automatic throttle. Nobody votes, nobody can override it. It just reacts to total hashrate.
• Rising difficulty over years means new miners and bigger operations have joined, strengthening the wall of energy around the network.
How it connects: Difficulty + hashrate together tell you how much real-world energy is protecting the ledger at any given time.
How to read the trend: Look for stair-steps upward across halvings. Short drops can happen if price falls and some miners power off, but the long-term shape tells the truth about security growth.
What it is: The count of transactions that made it into blocks on a given day. These are final settlements on the base layer.
• Many small payments can happen off-chain (Lightning, exchanges, custodians), but they eventually settle back to the chain.
Why it matters: If nobody was using Bitcoin to move value, this number would trend toward zero over time.
• Instead, healthy or rising transaction counts suggest the network is doing real economic work: savings moving, channels opening, exchanges rebalancing, etc.
How it connects: When usage rises faster than block space, fees can spike. That’s a signal of demand for scarce block space.
How to read the trend: Short-term spikes can be noise (NFT waves, inscriptions, one-off events). The bigger signal is the long-term floor: are we seeing more regular, everyday settlements now than years ago?
What it is: The number of unique addresses that sent or received coins that day.
• One person can control many addresses, and one address can represent a whole service, so it’s not a perfect “user count”.
Why it matters: If this number collapses long-term, it would mean fewer wallets, fewer services, and fewer participants touching the chain.
• When the long-term floor rises, it usually means more people have wallets, more businesses are integrating Bitcoin, and more infrastructure exists.
How it connects: Combined with transactions per day, it helps reveal whether the network is concentrated in a few big players or spread across many participants.
How to read the trend: Look at 1-year and all-time views: is the baseline today clearly higher than it was years ago, even after hype cycles come and go?
