Bitcoin (BTC) Price, Chart & Analysis BTC

Bitcoin is the original public blockchain: a network of independent nodes that agree, roughly every ten minutes, on a shared ledger of transactions. No company operates it, no board approves changes, and no central party can reverse a confirmed payment. That last property is the whole point, and it is also the source of most of the trouble people get into with it.

How it actually works

Miners compete to append the next block by expending electricity on a computational puzzle. The winner earns newly issued bitcoin plus the fees attached to the transactions they include. This is what “proof of work” means in practice: security is bought with real-world energy, and rewriting history would mean out-spending everyone else, continuously. Issuance halves roughly every four years and is capped, which is why Bitcoin is often framed as a scarce asset rather than a payment network.

What it is good at, and what it is not

Bitcoin settles large value between parties who do not trust each other, without a bank in the middle, and it does so predictably. It is deliberately conservative: the base layer processes a modest number of transactions per block, and that constraint is a design choice, not an oversight. It is poor at small everyday payments when the network is busy, because fees are set by competition for limited block space. Layers built on top aim to address that, with their own trade-offs.

Where the risk sits

The protocol has never been successfully attacked, but that says nothing about the ways people actually lose money. Custody is the main one: if you hold your own keys and lose them, nobody can restore access, and if you hold on a platform, you are exposed to that platform’s solvency and conduct rather than to Bitcoin itself. Price volatility is severe and drawdowns of more than half from a peak have happened repeatedly. Regulatory treatment varies enormously by country and affects what you can do, how you are taxed, and whether a given venue will serve you at all.

How to read the figures above

The price and market statistics on this page come from a public market API and carry the time they were read. Market capitalisation is simply price multiplied by circulating supply — a useful comparison tool, not a measure of money invested. The chart is drawn from daily closing candles, so it will not match an exchange’s intraday high or low.