Bitcoin Price Tracker (BTC) & Whale Tracker

What is Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a digital currency that runs without a central issuer. A pseudonymous author, Satoshi Nakamoto, published the design in a nine-page paper on 31 October 2008 and mined the first block on 3 January 2009. The network has run continuously since then, processing payments between people who never need to trust each other or a bank in the middle.

Every bitcoin transaction is recorded in a public ledger called the blockchain. Thousands of computers around the world hold a full copy of that ledger and check every new entry against the same rules. Nobody can print extra bitcoin, reverse a confirmed payment or freeze an address, because no single party controls the ledger.

The unit of account is the bitcoin, written BTC. One bitcoin divides into 100 million satoshis, so you can hold or send a tiny fraction. Most people buy a few hundred dollars' worth at a time rather than a whole coin.

How Bitcoin works

Transactions are grouped into blocks roughly every ten minutes. Miners compete to add the next block by solving a computational puzzle known as proof of work, using the SHA-256 hashing function. The miner who wins adds the block, collects the block reward plus the fees inside it, and the rest of the network verifies the result in seconds. The puzzle difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks, about two weeks, so blocks keep arriving at the same pace whether a few thousand or a few million machines are mining.

Ownership is handled with public-key cryptography. Your wallet holds a private key, which signs transactions, and the network knows only the public address derived from it. Lose the private key and the coins are gone for good; share it and anyone can spend them. Hardware wallets exist to keep that key off internet-connected devices.

Bitcoin's base layer settles a few transactions per second, which is slow for everyday payments. The Lightning Network, a second layer launched in 2018, opens payment channels that settle thousands of small payments off-chain and only touch the blockchain when a channel opens or closes. Upgrades such as SegWit in 2017 and Taproot in 2021 made transactions smaller and more private without changing the monetary rules.

Supply and tokenomics

Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million coins, and that limit is enforced by code rather than policy. New coins enter circulation only through the block reward, which halves every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years. The reward started at 50 BTC in 2009, fell to 25 in 2012, 12.5 in 2016, 6.25 in 2020 and 3.125 after the April 2024 halving. The next halving is expected in 2028.

About 95 percent of all bitcoin has already been mined. The remaining coins trickle out over the next century, with the final satoshi expected around the year 2140. Because the issuance schedule is public and fixed, bitcoin's inflation rate is known decades in advance, which is the main reason investors compare it to gold.

Several million coins are believed to be lost forever in forgotten wallets, including the roughly one million attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, which have never moved. Lost coins shrink the effective supply further. The live circulating supply, market cap and volume figures sit at the top of this page and refresh automatically.

History and milestones

The first known commercial purchase was two pizzas for 10,000 BTC in May 2010. Exchanges such as Mt. Gox made trading possible in the early years, and Mt. Gox's collapse in 2014 after losing around 850,000 BTC remains the biggest exchange failure in the asset's history. The 2017 scaling debate produced the Bitcoin Cash fork in August of that year, which has its own page on this site.

Institutional adoption gathered pace from 2020. Public companies added bitcoin to their treasuries, El Salvador made it legal tender in September 2021, and in January 2024 the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds. Those ETFs let pension funds and brokerage customers hold exposure without touching a wallet, and they quickly became some of the fastest-growing funds ever launched.

Bitcoin has survived multiple drawdowns of more than 70 percent, several attempted hard forks, government bans in various countries and a mining exodus from China in 2021. Each time the network kept producing blocks on schedule, which is the property long-term holders care about most.

Where to buy and trade Bitcoin

Bitcoin trades on every major exchange, including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bybit and Bitstamp, and in spot ETF form through ordinary brokerage accounts in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong and parts of Europe. Trading pairs exist against the dollar, euro, pound, most Asian currencies and every large stablecoin. Deep liquidity means spreads are tight even for very large orders.

If you buy on an exchange, the exchange holds the coins for you until you withdraw them. Many holders move long-term positions to a hardware wallet they control. Our exchanges page compares fees, supported countries and withdrawal limits, and the whale tracker on this page shows large wallet movements that often precede exchange inflows and outflows.

Risks to understand

Bitcoin is volatile. Daily moves of five to ten percent are normal and multi-year bear markets have cut the price by three quarters more than once. Position sizes should reflect that. Self-custody carries its own risk: there is no password reset, and phishing sites and fake wallet apps target newcomers constantly.

Regulation differs by country and keeps changing. Some jurisdictions tax every disposal as a capital gain, others ban exchanges outright. Mining concentration, quantum computing and protocol bugs are longer-term debates worth reading about, though none has threatened the network so far. Nothing on this page is investment advice; it is a reference for understanding what you are looking at in the charts above.

Bitcoin FAQ