Bitcoin (BTC) price, chart and history
Bitcoin is $84,632.52, down 1.55% in the last 24 hours. Market value $1.70 trillion, rank #1.
About Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a digital currency that lets people send value directly to each other over the internet, with no bank or payment company in the middle. Every payment is recorded on a public ledger, called the blockchain, that anyone can inspect. Many people hold it as a long-term savings asset, often described as digital gold, while others use it for cross-border payments, and large investment funds now hold it on behalf of their clients.
Bitcoin was described in a short paper published in October 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym whose real identity is still unknown. The network went live in January 2009, and Nakamoto stepped away from the project in late 2010. No company or foundation owns Bitcoin. Its open-source software is maintained by volunteer developers, and rule changes only take effect when the wider community of users, node operators and miners chooses to adopt them.
Bitcoin is secured by proof of work: miners run specialised computers that compete to add a new block roughly every ten minutes, earning newly created coins plus fees. That reward halves about every four years, and the total can never exceed 21 million coins. Critics point to its heavy electricity use, sharp price swings, slow and sometimes costly base-layer payments, and use in scams, while anyone who loses their private keys loses their coins for good.
- Created by
- Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym)
- Launched
- January 3, 2009
- How it's secured
- Proof-of-work mining
- Supply
- Capped at 21 million BTC
- Block time
- About 10 minutes on average