Bitcoin Price

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that lets value move between parties without a bank or payment processor in the middle. It went live on 3 January 2009, when the first block was mined, and it remains the largest cryptocurrency by market value.

The problem it set out to solve was double-spending. Digital files can be copied, so any purely electronic money needs some way to stop the same unit being spent twice. Previous attempts relied on a trusted company keeping the ledger. Bitcoin replaced that company with a public chain of blocks, each one confirming the transactions before it, secured by computational work that would have to be redone to alter the record.

That work is the mining process. Participants compete to find a value that, when hashed with SHA-256, produces a result beginning with a required number of zero bits. Finding it is hard; verifying it is trivial. The chain with the greatest accumulated work is treated as the valid one, so rewriting history means outpacing the entire honest network.

Supply is capped at 21 million BTC and issued on a fixed schedule that halves roughly every four years. This is the feature most often cited by holders: no committee can decide to create more. It also means the system's security budget must eventually shift from newly issued coins to transaction fees paid by users.

Bitcoin does not try to do everything. Its scripting language is deliberately limited, transactions settle in about ten minutes, and throughput is modest by design. Projects that wanted programmability went elsewhere. What Bitcoin optimised for instead was durability and predictability — a ledger that behaves the same way in 2030 as it did in 2010.

In practice it is used mainly as a store of value and a settlement layer, with faster payment use cases handled by systems built on top of it.