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BTC Price Live Data

The live Bitcoin price today is $36,775.59 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $43,229,586,453 USD. Bitcoin is down 0.36% in the last 24 hours. The current CoinMarketCap ranking is #1, with a live market cap of $688,882,653,471 USD. It has a circulating supply of 18,732,062 BTC coins and a max. supply of 21,000,000 BTC coins.

If you would like to know where to buy Bitcoin , the top exchanges for trading in Bitcoin are currently Binance, Huobi Global, OKEx, ZG.com, and Bybit. You can find others listed on our crypto exchanges page.

What Is Bitcoin (BTC)?

Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency originally described in a 2008 whitepaper by a person, or group of people, using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. It was launched soon after, in January 2009.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer online currency, meaning that all transactions happen directly between equal, independent network participants, without the need for any intermediary to permit or facilitate them. Bitcoin was created, according to Nakamoto’s own words, to allow “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

Some concepts for a similar type of a decentralized electronic currency precede BTC, but Bitcoin holds the distinction of being the first-ever cryptocurrency to come into actual use.

Who Are the Founders of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin’s original inventor is known under a pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. As of 2020, the true identity of the person — or organization — that is behind the alias remains unknown.

On October 31, 2008, Nakamoto published Bitcoin’s whitepaper, which described in detail how a peer-to-peer, online currency could be implemented. They proposed to use a decentralized ledger of transactions packaged in batches (called “blocks”) and secured by cryptographic algorithms — the whole system would later be dubbed “blockchain.”

Just two months later, on January 3, 2009, Nakamoto mined the first block on the Bitcoin network, known as the genesis block, thus launching the world’s first cryptocurrency.

However, while Nakamoto was the original inventor of Bitcoin, as well as the author of its very first implementation, over the years a large number of people have contributed to improving the cryptocurrency’s software by patching vulnerabilities and adding new features.

Bitcoin’s source code repository on GitHub lists more than 750 contributors, with some of the key ones being Wladimir J. van der Laan, Marco Falke, Pieter Wuille, Gavin Andresen, Jonas Schnelli and others.

What Makes Bitcoin Unique?

Bitcoin’s most unique advantage comes from the fact that it was the very first cryptocurrency to appear on the market.

It has managed to create a global community and give birth to an entirely new industry of millions of enthusiasts who create, invest in, trade and use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in their everyday lives. The emergence of the first cryptocurrency has created a conceptual and technological basis that subsequently inspired the development of thousands of competing projects.

The entire cryptocurrency market — now worth more than $300 billion — is based on the idea realized by Bitcoin: money that can be sent and received by anyone, anywhere in the world without reliance on trusted intermediaries, such as banks and financial services companies.

Thanks to its pioneering nature, BTC remains at the top of this energetic market after over a decade of existence. Even after Bitcoin has lost its undisputed dominance, it remains the largest cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization that fluctuated between $100-$200 billion in 2020, owing in large part to the ubiquitousness of platforms that provide use-cases for BTC: wallets, exchanges, payment services, online games and more.

Related Pages:

Looking for market and blockchain data for BTC? Visit our block explorer.

Want to buy Bitcoin? Use CoinMarketCap’s guide.

How Much Bitcoin Is in Circulation?

Bitcoin’s total supply is limited by its software and will never exceed 21,000,000 coins. New coins are created during the process known as “mining”: as transactions are relayed across the network, they get picked up by miners and packaged into blocks, which are in turn protected by complex cryptographic calculations.

As compensation for spending their computational resources, the miners receive rewards for every block that they successfully add to the blockchain. At the moment of Bitcoin’s launch, the reward was 50 bitcoins per block: this number gets halved with every 210,000 new blocks mined — which takes the network roughly four years. As of 2020, the block reward has been halved three times and comprises 6.25 bitcoins.

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Bitcoin has not been premined, meaning that no coins have been mined and/or distributed between the founders before it became available to the public. However, during the first few years of BTC’s existence, the competition between miners was relatively low, allowing the earliest network participants to accumulate significant amounts of coins via regular mining: Satoshi Nakamoto alone is believed to own over a million Bitcoin.

Mining Bitcoins can be very profitable for miners, depending on the current hash rate and the price of Bitcoin. While the process of mining Bitcoins is complex, we discuss how long it takes to mine one Bitcoin on CMC Alexandria — as we wrote above, mining Bitcoin is best understood as how long it takes to mine one block, as opposed to one Bitcoin.

How Is the Bitcoin Network Secured?

Bitcoin is secured with the SHA-256 algorithm, which belongs to the SHA-2 family of hashing algorithms, which is also used by its fork Bitcoin Cash (BCH), as well as several other cryptocurrencies.

What Is Bitcoin’s Role as a Store of Value?

Bitcoin is the first decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency. One of its most important functions is that it is used as a decentralized store of value. In other words, it provides for ownership rights as a physical asset or as a unit of account. However, the latter store-of-value function has been debated. Many crypto enthusiasts and economists believe that high-scale adoption of the top currency will lead us to a new modern financial world where transaction amounts will be denominated in smaller units.

The top crypto is considered a store of value, like gold, for many — rather than a currency. This idea of the first cryptocurrency as a store of value, instead of a payment method, means that many people buy the crypto and hold onto it long-term (or HODL) rather than spending it on items like you would typically spend a dollar — treating it as digital gold.

Crypto Wallets

The most popular wallets for cryptocurrency include both hot and cold wallets. Cryptocurrency wallets vary from hot wallets and cold wallets. Hot wallets are able to be connected to the web, while cold wallets are used for keeping large amounts of coins outside of the internet.

Some of the top crypto cold wallets are Trezor, Ledger and CoolBitX. Some of the top crypto hot wallets include Exodus, Electrum and Mycelium.

How Is Bitcoin’s Technology Upgraded?

A hard fork is a radical change to the protocol that makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid, and therefore requires all users to upgrade. For example, if users A and B are disagreeing on whether an incoming transaction is valid, a hard fork could make the transaction valid to users A and B, but not to user C.

A hard fork is a protocol upgrade that is not backward compatible. This means every node (computer connected to the Bitcoin network using a client that performs the task of validating and relaying transactions) needs to upgrade before the new blockchain with the hard fork activates and rejects any blocks or transactions from the old blockchain. The old blockchain will continue to exist and will continue to accept transactions, although it may be incompatible with other newer Bitcoin clients.

A soft fork is a change to the Bitcoin protocol wherein only previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid. Since old nodes will recognise the new blocks as valid, a soft fork is backward-compatible. This kind of fork requires only a majority of the miners upgrading to enforce the new rules.

Some examples of prominent cryptocurrencies that have undergone hard forks are the following: Bitcoin’s hard fork that resulted in Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum’s hard fork that resulted in Ethereum Classic.

https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/bitcoin-vs-bitcoin-cash-vs-bitcoin-svBitcoin Cash has been hard forked since its original forking, with the creation of Bitcoin SV.

What Is the Lightning Network?

The Lightning Network is an off-chain, layered payment protocol that operates bidirectional payment channels which allows instantaneous transfer with instant reconciliation. It enables private, high volume and trustless transactions between any two parties. The Lightning Network scales transaction capacity without incurring the costs associated with transactions and interventions on the underlying blockchain.

How Much Is Bitcoin?

The current valuation of Bitcoin is constantly moving, all day every day. It is a truly global asset. From a start of under one cent per coin, BTC has risen in price by thousands of percent to the numbers you see above. The prices of all cryptocurrencies are quite volatile, meaning that anyone’s understanding of how much is Bitcoin will change by the minute. However, there are times when different countries and exchanges show different prices and understanding how much is Bitcoin will be a function of a person’s location.

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Where Can You Buy Bitcoin (BTC)?

Bitcoin is, in many regards, almost synonymous with cryptocurrency, which means that you can buy Bitcoin on virtually every crypto exchange — both for fiat money and other cryptocurrencies. Some of the main markets where BTC trading is available are:

If you are new to crypto, use CoinMarketCap’s own easy guide to buying Bitcoin.

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Bitcoin Price and Market Stats

Bitcoin Price
BTC Price $36,740
Market Cap $689,268,511,234
Market Cap Dominance 42.29%
Trading Volume $41,797,249,344
Volume / Market Cap 0.0623
24h Low / 24h High $35,855 / $38,849
7d Low / 7d High $33,451 / $37,554
Market Cap Rank #1
All-Time High $64,805 -43.1%
Apr 14, 2021 (about 2 months)
All-Time Low $67.81 54304.1%
Jul 06, 2013 (almost 8 years)

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36730.4 USD

# Exchange Pair Price Spread +2% Depth -2% Depth 24h Volume Volume % Last Traded Trust Score
* 0.12% $3,297,948 $3,193,668 36988.85 USDC 0.05% $298,254 $282,585 36804.57 USDT 0.01% $16,483,631 $9,539,626 108497.618 BTC 9.53% Recently
2 36700.74731633 USD 0.03% $22,472,920 $25,788,260 9737.678 BTC 0.85% Recently
3 4014799.99999984 JPY 0.02% $22,810,671 $26,593,092 30116.109152 EUR 0.07% $22,641,922 $26,686,265 25881 GBP 0.08% $21,726,801 $27,420,132

Bitcoin Price & Market Data

Bitcoin price today is $36,872 with a 24-hour trading volume of $42,897,210,001 . BTC price is up 0.1% in the last 24 hours. It has a circulating supply of 19 Million BTC coins and a max supply of 21 Million. If you are looking to buy or sell Bitcoin, Binance is currently the most active exchange.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It is a decentralized digital currency that is based on cryptography. As such, it can operate without the need of a central authority like a central bank or a company. It is unlike government-issued or fiat currencies such as US Dollars or Euro in which they are controlled by the country’s central bank. The decentralized nature allows it to operate on a peer-to-peer network whereby users are able to send funds to each other without going through intermediaries.

For more information on Bitcoin, do read CoinGecko’s How to Bitcoin book.

Who created Bitcoin?

The creator is an unknown individual or group that goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto with the idea of an electronic peer-to-peer cash system as it is written in a whitepaper. Until today, the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has not been verified though there has been speculation and rumor as to who Satoshi might be.

When was Bitcoin launched?

It was launched in January 2009 with the first genesis block mined on 9th January 2009.

How does Bitcoin work?

While the general public perceives Bitcoin as some kind of physical looking coin, it is actually far from that. Under the hood, it is actually a distributed accounting ledger that is stored in a form of a chain of blocks, hence the name blockchain.

In a centralized system like the ones operated by a commercial bank, given a situation where Alice wants to transact with Bob, the bank is the only entity that holds the ledger that describes how much balance Alice and Bob has. As the bank maintains the ledger, they will do the verification as to whether Alice has enough funds to send to Bob. Finally when the transaction successfully takes place, the Bank will deduct Alice’s account and credit Bob’s account with the latest amount.

Bitcoin conversely works in a decentralized manner. Since there is no central figure like a bank to verify the transactions and maintain the ledger, a copy of the ledger is distributed across Bitcoin nodes. A node is a piece of software that anybody can download and run to participate in the network. With that, everybody has a copy of how much balance Alice and Bob has, and there will be no dispute of fund balance.

Now, if Alice were to transact with Bob using bitcoin. Alice will have to broadcast her transaction to the network that she intends to send $1 to Bob in equivalent amount of bitcoin. How would the system be able to determine that she has enough bitcoin to execute the transaction and also to ensure she does not double spend that same amount.

Here is where mining takes place. A Bitcoin miner will use his or her computer rigs to validate Alice’s transaction to be added into the ledger. In order to stop a miner from adding any arbitrary transactions, they will need to solve a complex puzzle. Only if the miner is able to solve the puzzle (called the Proof of Work), which happens at random, then he or she is able to add the transactions into the ledger and the record is final.

Since running these computer rigs cost money due to capital expenditure for buying the rigs and the cost of electricity, miners are rewarded with new supply of bitcoins that is part of its monetary system and some amount of fees paid by the person who wishes to transact (in this case it is Alice).

This makes the Bitcoin ledger resilient against fraud in a trustless manner. While it is resilient, there are still some risks associated with the system such as the 51% attack where by miners control more than 51% of the total computation power and also there can be security risks outside of the control of the Bitcoin protocol.

How to keep your Bitcoin safe?

When transacting coins, you would typically be doing it on your personal computer. Since your personal computer is connected to the internet, it has the potential to be infected by malware or spywares which could compromise your funds.

Hardware wallets such as Trezor and Ledger are strongly encouraged in mitigating that risk. These are external devices that look like USB sticks. A hardware wallet secures your private key that holds your Bitcoin into an external device outside of your personal computer. When you intend to transact, you would connect the hardware wallet into your personal computer, and all the key signing in order to transact would be done in the hardware itself outside of your computer.

However, if you physically lose your hardware wallet without a key phrase backup, there is no other way of recovering your funds ever. As such when setting up your hardware wallet, always remember to keep a copy of the key phrase and put it somewhere safe from fire or flood.

Bitcoin Halving

Bitcoin Halving or sometimes also known as the Halvening, refers to the reduction of block reward to miners by half. This is part of its built-in monetary policy, in which after every approximately 4 years, the mining reward will be halved towards the limited capped supply of 21 million Bitcoin. Once 21 million of Bitcoin have been minted, there will no longer be new supply of it rewarded to miners, and miners are expected to earn revenue by way of transaction fees.

In order to follow the real time of when the halving will take place, you can bookmark the CoinGecko’s bitcoin halving page.

This is seen as a significant event for couple of reasons. Firstly, traders may speculate on the possible scarcity of Bitcoin making way to high volatility. Secondly, as miners’ rewards will be reduced, we may see some miners exiting the market as they could not sustain the lower profitability. This in turn may cause the hashing rate to reduce and mining pools may consolidate. Due to this, the bitcoin network may be a little unstable during the halving period.

Is Bitcoin a good investment?

We do not provide investment advice. The price of bitcoin started off as zero and made its way to the market price you see today. It appears that the market is placing value for the following reasons.

  1. Digital Gold — It is a viable digital store of value due to its digital scarcity
  2. Payment — Almost instant and low cost transaction with anyone on the internet
  3. Speculation — This may be due to inefficiency in the market, but there are people speculating that Bitcoin may be the asset class of the future

That being said, Bitcoin comes with risks. In order to determine for yourself if it is a good investment, it is important to understand the risk and only invest amount that you are comfortable losing.

There is a probability of Bitcoin price going to zero. This can happen if the project fails, a critical software bug is found, or there are newer more innovative digital currencies that would take over its place. If you recall Bitcoin was worth nearly $20,000 in 16th December 2017. But in 17th December 2018, the price of Bitcoin was at its low of about $3,200. Bitcoin is a highly volatile asset class and requires a high risk appetite.

As much as Bitcoin is a digital gold, it has only been around for about 10 years. In comparison to gold which has been a widely known store of value for over hundreds of years.

Can I short Bitcoin?

Yes, as bitcoin has grown to become more widely adopted, there are various derivative products being launched that allows you to short sell bitcoin. If you are an institutional investor, CME and Bakkt provide regulated bitcoin futures products which you can participate to long or short bitcoin. Alternatively, there are many other cryptocurrency derivative exchanges such as BitMEX, Binance Futures, FTX, Deribit, and more. These derivative exchanges are not formally regulated and can provide even up to 100x leverage. Derivative contracts are high risk products, you might want to understand what you are doing before participating in it.

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