Please note: like most trading venues, we display the current mid-market rates in our price charts. When you trade, you get the current bid or ask price depending on whether you are buying or selling. There is always a slight difference between the mid-market and the current bid or ask prices. This is a natural result of how Exchange order books work.

About Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency. Conceptually, it stems from several decades of efforts to use cryptography as a basis for digital money. In the 13 years since its creation in 2009, Bitcoin has gone from fascinating novelty among computer programmers and technology wonks to a recognized-around-the-world asset class, one that is highly liquid and, as of August 2022, possessed a market capitalization of nearly $500 billion, or big enough to rank among the ten largest capitalized companies in the world.

Beginners in crypto investing are encouraged to try to understand Bitcoin by thinking of it as just another form of software protocol, such as "http," which routes web content from servers to browsers. Really deep dives can get complicated in a hurry. But it helps to go back to the beginning.

In early January 2008, some unknown person or persons using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, detailing a blockchain-based network for sending and receiving transactions in a permissionless, trustless manner, beyond the oversight of any central authority.

A blockchain is a decentralized, public ledger digitally distributed across a network. The Bitcoin blockchain was built via open-source software, meaning anyone in the world can audit, contribute and improve its code and/or documentation.

Roughly one year after the release of the research paper, the network launched with the mining (by Satoshi Nakamoto) of rewards block #0, also known as the "genesis block," comprising 50 BTCs. Although not physically represented in any form, a small but monumental supply of digital money had been created. It was done so seemingly out of thin air, until, that is, one considers measurable computational contributions.

The Bitcoin blockchain, after recording that first transaction, kept on recording them, forming a chain of blocks, each block containing a cryptographic hash connecting with previous blocks, back to the genesis block.

Maintaining the blockchain falls on a global network of communicating nodes (computers running Bitcoin software). Each network node stores its own copy of the blockchain so as to independently verify the chain of ownership. Approximately every 10 minutes, a new block of transactions is added by "miners" to the chain, shared with all nodes, sans central oversight.

Mining refers to the systematic, synchronized processing of transactions and secure the network by way of distributed computing power expenditure. Becoming a Bitcoin miner requires specialized hardware and mining software that picks up transactions broadcast through the peer-to-peer network and, to confirm them, performs appropriate tasks that are often likened to solving next-to-impossible math problems but are more akin to trying to guess a randomly generated lottery ticket number out of an astronomical number of possibilities, using sophisticated algorithms.

From a miner's perspective, the economics of Bitcoin – the equipment, energy-use and regulatory challenges – make for a complicated endeavor.

But from a user perspective, Bitcoin is “pretty much like cash for the Internet," said Bitcoin.org. "It can also be seen as the most prominent triple entry bookkeeping system in existence."