About Bitcoin
Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency, launched in January 2009 by the pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. Described in the original 2008 whitepaper as "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system", Bitcoin lets anyone transfer value over the internet without relying on a bank, payment processor, or other intermediary. The native unit of the network, BTC, is issued and tracked by a decentralized network of computers running open-source software, with no central authority able to alter its rules unilaterally.
Bitcoin's monetary policy is hard-coded into the protocol. The total supply is capped at 21 million BTC, and new coins are released on a fixed, decreasing schedule. Every 210,000 blocks — roughly every four years — the block reward paid to miners is cut in half in an event known as the "halving". The most recent halving in April 2024 reduced the reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block, and the next halving is expected around 2028. Around 19.5 million BTC have already been mined, leaving fewer than 1.5 million still to be issued over the next century.
The Bitcoin network is secured by proof-of-work consensus. Miners compete to solve a SHA-256 hashing puzzle and the winner extends the blockchain with the next block, earning the block reward and the transaction fees inside it. Because rewriting Bitcoin's history would require redoing all of that work faster than the rest of the network combined, the cost of attacking Bitcoin scales with the total amount of computing power devoted to mining — making the network's security model both transparent and economically grounded. Average block times target ten minutes, and the protocol automatically adjusts the difficulty every 2,016 blocks to keep that pace stable as miners come and go.
Adoption has expanded steadily from a small cypherpunk community to a global asset class. Public companies, hedge funds, family offices and even sovereign nations now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, opening regulated exposure to traditional brokerage clients, and similar products have since launched in other jurisdictions. El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, and a growing list of merchants, payment processors and Lightning Network apps accept BTC for everyday transactions.
For everyday holders, BTC can be stored in self-custody software wallets, hardware wallets such as Ledger or Trezor, or with regulated custodians and exchanges. Crypto Market Watch tracks the live Bitcoin price, 24-hour and 7-day price changes, market capitalisation, trading volume, circulating supply, and all-time highs and lows on this page. The data is sourced directly from upstream market feeds and refreshed continuously throughout the trading day so investors can monitor Bitcoin's market activity in real time.
