Bitcoin Price
Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency, and still the easiest one to describe honestly: a shared ledger that thousands of independent computers keep in agreement, with no bank, company or government sitting in the middle. The design was set out in a white pap…
Market data via Binance · signals computed live from daily closes · not financial advice.
Key market insights
A plain-language read of live indicators computed from daily closes — these describe current price behaviour, not a forecast.
Technical analysis
Moving averages, momentum and support/resistance from daily closing prices — a snapshot of current structure, not a forecast.
Historical performance
52-week high and low with trailing returns across time windows. Computed from up to 365 daily closes.
Automated observations
Generated mechanically from current market data (volatility, trend, distance from highs) — descriptive, not advice.
Strengths · tailwinds
- MACD is above its signal line — near-term momentum is upward.
Risks · headwinds
- Trading 49% below its 52-week high — well off recent peaks.
- Max drawdown of -53% over the window — has endured deep peak-to-trough losses.
Supply structure
How much BTC is in circulation versus its fixed maximum — 94.6% of the maximum is circulating today.
Bitcoin derivatives
Live perpetual-swap metrics. Funding is the periodic payment between longs and shorts; open interest is the total value of outstanding contracts. Informational — not a recommendation to trade leveraged products.
Source: Binance Futures · funding shown per 8h and annualised. Leveraged products carry high risk; informational only.
What the markets price for Bitcoin
Implied probabilities from live Polymarket prediction markets that mention Bitcoin. Each figure is the market-priced chance of the outcome resolving Yes — a crowd forecast, not ours.
Source: Polymarket · probabilities reflect current market prices and change continuously. Shown for context only — not a forecast, endorsement or financial advice.
Convert Bitcoin to US Dollar
Two-way BTC ↔ USD at the live Binance price. Type an amount in either field, or tap a preset.
About Bitcoin
Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency, and still the easiest one to describe honestly: a shared ledger that thousands of independent computers keep in agreement, with no bank, company or government sitting in the middle. The design was set out in a white paper published under the name <em>Satoshi Nakamoto</em>, a person or group whose identity has never been established. The problem it set out to solve sounds small but is not — how do you hand a digital payment to a stranger without a trusted third party confirming that you have not already spent the same money somewhere else?
The answer is <a href="/glossary/proof-of-work/">proof of work</a>. Miners race to bundle recent transactions into a block, spending real electricity on a brute-force guessing game, and the network tunes the difficulty so that a new block arrives roughly every ten minutes on average. The winner collects newly issued coins plus the fees inside that block. Issuance is not open-ended: the reward is cut in half at fixed intervals, an event called the <a href="/glossary/halving/">halving</a> that comes around roughly every four years, and the total supply is capped at 21 million. Rewriting old history would mean redoing all that work, which is exactly the point.
Day to day, Bitcoin is used mainly as a long-horizon savings asset and as a settlement rail for value that has to cross borders without anyone's permission. It also does quiet, unglamorous work in places where the local currency is unreliable. Most people who hold it seriously move it off exchanges and keep their own keys, and our <a href="/toolkit/how-to-set-up-a-hardware-wallet/">hardware wallet walkthrough</a> and <a href="/toolkit/how-to-back-up-a-seed-phrase/">seed phrase backup guide</a> exist for exactly that step.
The trade-offs are real ones. Block space is deliberately scarce, so fees climb when the network is busy, and small everyday payments increasingly happen on layer-2 systems built on top rather than on the base chain. Mining's appetite for electricity is a legitimate argument, not a smear. The price swings hard enough to be genuinely uncomfortable. And self-custody moves risk rather than removing it: lose your keys and there is no helpline, no reset and no recovery.
Bitcoin vs peers
| Coin | Price | 24h | Market Cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin BTC | $64,311.57 | +0.19% | $1.28T |
| Ethereum ETH | $1,870.92 | +0.55% | $225.45B |
| Tether USDT | $1.00 | +0.00% | $140.00B |
| BNB BNB | $568.54 | +0.61% | $79.60B |
| XRP XRP | $1.10 | +0.66% | $63.69B |
| USD Coin USDC | $1.00 | +0.01% | $60.05B |
Bitcoin FAQ
Do I need to buy a whole bitcoin?
No. Each coin divides into far smaller units called satoshis, so you can hold an arbitrarily small slice. Exchanges and apps let you buy a fixed amount of money's worth rather than a whole coin. The unit you see quoted is only a convention; the network itself counts in satoshis, and a fraction of a coin behaves exactly like any other holding you might have.
What actually happens at a halving?
The amount of new bitcoin paid to miners for each block is cut in half. Nothing else changes: transactions carry on, the ten-minute block target stays, and no action is required from holders. It matters because it is the schedule by which new supply slows towards the 21 million cap, and because it squeezes miners whose costs did not halve alongside their reward.
Is Bitcoin anonymous?
No, it is pseudonymous, which is a weaker thing. Every transaction is public forever, so anyone can follow the flow between addresses. What is missing is the name attached to an address. Once an address is linked to you — through an exchange account with identity checks, a payment, or a careless post — much of your history can be reconstructed backwards from it.
What is the safest way to store bitcoin?
For anything you would be upset to lose, a hardware wallet you control beats leaving coins on an exchange, because an exchange balance is a promise from a company rather than coins you hold. The catch is that the backup phrase becomes the single point of failure. Write it down offline, keep it away from cameras and cloud storage, and test recovery before you rely on it.
What happens when the last coin is mined?
Miners stop receiving newly issued coins and are paid only by transaction fees. That transition is far off and gradual, since the reward shrinks step by step rather than stopping abruptly. Whether fee income alone will support enough mining to keep the network secure is one of the genuinely open questions about Bitcoin's long-term design, and reasonable people disagree about it.
Can anyone change or shut down Bitcoin?
There is no company to serve with an order and no switch to flip. Rules change only when the people running nodes choose to run new software, which is why changes are slow and contested. Groups that disagree can split off into a separate chain, and several have. Governments can regulate the on-ramps and off-ramps around it, and they do, but the network itself keeps producing blocks.
Last updated Jul 25, 2026