Bitcoin (BTC) Price, Chart & Analysis

Bitcoin launched in January 2009, published by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto a few months after the white paper that described it. It was the first working answer to a long-standing problem in computer science: how to let strangers agree on who owns what, in order, without appointing anyone to keep the books.

How it works

Bitcoin uses proof of work. Miners race to find a SHA-256 hash below a moving target, and the winner appends the next block of transactions. The difficulty of that race adjusts roughly every two weeks so blocks keep arriving about ten minutes apart regardless of how much hardware is pointed at the network. Rewriting history means redoing all the work since the block you want to change, which is what makes settled Bitcoin transactions expensive to reverse.

Balances are not stored as accounts. Each transaction consumes earlier outputs and creates new ones — the UTXO model — which makes validation simple and auditable but means a wallet’s “balance” is really the sum of the unspent pieces it controls.

Supply

Bitcoin’s issuance is fixed in code. The block subsidy paid to miners halves every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years, and the total that will ever exist is capped at 21 million. This is the feature most often cited by people who treat it as a reserve asset, and the one that draws the most criticism from people who think a fixed supply is the wrong design for money. Both arguments are older than most of the coins on this site.

What to watch

Because the subsidy shrinks on a known schedule, miner revenue depends increasingly on transaction fees, and fee pressure shows up as competition for limited block space. Hash rate, difficulty adjustments and the share of supply that has not moved in years are the on-chain numbers most analysts follow. None of them predict price, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.