Bitcoin price (BTC)

About Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency: a way to send value directly between people without a bank or payment company in the middle. Thousands of independent computers keep the same public record of every transaction, and they follow the same rules to agree on what gets added to it.

Two design choices define it. Adding to the record requires proof of work, a costly computation, so rewriting history is impractical. And the supply is fixed by code: no more than 21 million bitcoin will ever exist. Together they make Bitcoin a scarce digital asset that nobody can print more of, which is why it is often called digital gold.

Who created Bitcoin?

Bitcoin was created by a person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is still unknown. Nakamoto published the paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" in 2008, and the network started with its first block, the genesis block, on 3 January 2009. Nakamoto stayed involved with the early community until 2010 and then stepped away; the software has since been maintained by many independent contributors.

How does Bitcoin work?

Payments are grouped into blocks. Each block contains the fingerprint (hash) of the block before it, forming a chain that is very hard to alter. Miners compete to add the next block by finding a value that makes the block's hash fall below a target, and the winner earns newly created bitcoin plus the fees in that block. A new block arrives roughly every ten minutes, and the target adjusts every 2,016 blocks to keep that pace.

You control bitcoin with a private key. Whoever holds the key can spend the coins at the matching address, and there is no reset button, which is why backups matter. The smallest unit is a satoshi, one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin. See the Crypto 101 guides on what a blockchain is, how transactions work and UTXOs.

Bitcoin security and the SHA-256 algorithm

Bitcoin's mining uses SHA-256, a widely studied cryptographic hash function, applied twice to the block header. Finding a valid header is expensive but checking one is instant, so anyone can verify the chain without trusting the miners. Because every block commits to the previous one, changing an old transaction would mean redoing the work of every later block faster than the rest of the network, which becomes less realistic with each new block.

The energy debate

Proof of work uses a lot of electricity by design: the cost is what makes attacks expensive. Critics point to the energy consumption and its emissions; supporters argue the spending secures a global network and that miners seek out the cheapest power, which can include otherwise wasted or stranded energy. Both points are real, and where a given miner's power comes from varies widely. The trade-offs against proof of stake are laid out in proof of work vs. proof of stake.

How to keep your bitcoin safe

Safety comes down to your keys. Keep your recovery phrase or keys offline in a place only you control, never share them or type them into a website, and treat anyone who asks for them as a scammer. A wallet where you hold the keys means no company can freeze or lose your coins, but it also means nobody can recover them for you, so test your backup. Read private keys and seed phrases, backups and recovery and the scams checklist.

Bitcoin price and volatility

Bitcoin's price can move a lot in a short time. A few forces explain most of it. Fixed supply, changing demand: supply cannot expand to meet demand, so shifts in sentiment show up in the price. A market that never closes: trading runs around the clock, so news is priced in immediately. Liquidity: it is large but smaller than the biggest traditional markets, so very large orders can move it. Macro conditions: interest rates, inflation and risk appetite increasingly influence it.

The live chart above uses Scrypt Price's aggregate of independent exchanges, with performance over 1 hour to 1 year and the highest and lowest prices in the history we hold.

What makes Bitcoin valuable?

Bitcoin solved the double-spending problem for digital cash without a trusted middleman, and it did so with a supply that cannot be changed by any company or government. That combination gives it three properties people value: scarcity (a hard cap of 21 million), censorship resistance (nobody can freeze an address or block a valid transaction) and portability (any amount can be sent anywhere within minutes). Whether that is worth a particular price is a market judgement, and the supply-and-demand framework in our tokenomics paper shows how to reason about it.

The Bitcoin halving

Roughly every four years, or every 210,000 blocks, the reward miners receive for a block is cut in half. It started at 50 BTC in 2009, fell to 25 in 2012, 12.5 in 2016, 6.25 in 2020 and 3.125 in April 2024. The next halving, at block 1,050,000, will cut it to 1.5625. The schedule is written into the consensus code, and it is why the total supply approaches, but never exceeds, 21 million. Around 2140 the last bitcoin will be created and miners will depend on transaction fees.

See the live countdown and every halving on the Bitcoin halving page.

Bitcoin upgrades: SegWit, Taproot and Lightning

Bitcoin changes slowly and mostly through backward-compatible upgrades. Segregated Witness (SegWit), activated in 2017, fixed transaction malleability and raised effective block capacity; SegWit addresses start with bc1. Taproot, activated in November 2021, added Schnorr signatures and more flexible scripts, improving privacy and efficiency for complex spending conditions. The Lightning Network is a separate layer for fast, low-fee payments: users lock funds in a channel on Bitcoin, exchange many payments off-chain, and settle the final balance on-chain.

The Bitcoin ecosystem and adoption

Around the base protocol, developers have built layers and services: Lightning for payments, inscription protocols such as Ordinals introduced in 2023, and wrapped versions of bitcoin that let it be used in smart-contract networks; see Bitcoin on Solana with zBTC and how wrapped assets stay backed. Adoption has also broadened: spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds began trading in the United States in January 2024, some companies hold bitcoin as a treasury asset, and El Salvador adopted it as legal tender in 2021.

Owning bitcoin through a fund is convenient but means trusting the fund's custodian; holding it yourself means you control the keys and are responsible for them.

Sources: Bitcoin whitepaper (Nakamoto, 2008) · Bitcoin Core consensus code: block subsidy · Bitcoin Wiki: genesis block · BIP-141: Segregated Witness · BIP-341: Taproot · Lightning Network paper (Poon & Dryja)