What is the price of bitcoin today?
As of 8 a.m. ET, the price of bitcoin, or 1 BTC, was $59,374.84. The crypto’s highest intraday price in the past year was $73,750.07 on March 14, 2024.
Bitcoin chart
The above chart pulls data as of 8 a.m. ET daily. It doesn’t display intraday highs or lows.
Bitcoin prices
Bitcoin’s all-time high was $73,750.07 on March 14, 2024. Its lowest intraday price in the past year was $24,930.30 on Sep. 11, 2023. Bitcoin is up 128% year over year.
The original crypto had humble beginnings in January 2009. Today, it has a market cap of $1.17 trillion.
Bitcoin is becoming a popular alternative to government-backed fiat currencies, such as the U.S. dollar. Fiat currencies tend to lose value over time due to inflation.
What is bitcoin?
Bitcoin launched the world’s first blockchain-based network to make financial transactions. It’s powered by millions of global users. Anyone with internet access can make financial transactions without banks or government intermediaries.
Every transaction on the blockchain is validated by miners. Miners use high-powered computers to solve complex math problems and create new blocks in the chain. They’re paid with newly created BTC for their work maintaining the network.
In the years since its launch, thousands of cryptocurrencies have tried to recreate bitcoin’s success. While some have grown rapidly, none have matched bitcoin’s value or popularity.
What determines bitcoin’s price?
Because bitcoin does not represent ownership of tangible assets and does not generate earnings, revenue, or cash flow, its price is determined exclusively by supply and demand.
Bitcoin’s network automatically releases new bitcoins to miners each time they verify and add a new block of transactions to the blockchain. The total supply of bitcoin is capped at 21 million BTC.
Given bitcoin’s fixed supply, demand is the primary variable determining its price. This demand fluctuates mainly based on investor sentiment.
Bitcoin’s starting price
The first recorded bitcoin price came in late 2009 when users in the BitcoinTalk online forum exchanged 5,050 BTC for $5.02 via PayPal. This transaction valued bitcoin at about $0.00099 per BTC, or about one-tenth of a cent.
Bitcoin halving dates
Bitcoin’s network undergoes a process known as halving after 210,000 blocks of transactions are added to the blockchain.
Miners receive a set BTC reward for validating new blocks. The process is called a halving because it cuts that reward in half. Halving is crucial because it limits the BTC supply and supports its price over time.
Does bitcoin halving increase BTC’s price?
Slowing the rate at which miners draw bitcoin should drive prices higher. But there’s no guarantee it will play out that way in the markets.
Historically, BTC prices have followed certain cycles around halving events. Prices have typically bottomed about a year before a halving. Then they rise for more than a year after a halving. But these patterns aren’t set in stone.
Bitcoin price history
2010 – 2019
The first online bitcoin exchanges emerged in 2010. The price per coin grew from the $1 threshold in 2011.
From there, BTC prices continued to climb, reaching the $1,000 mark in late 2013. Its popularity and trading volumes snowballed four years later.
In November 2017, bitcoin reached $10,000 and peaked at over $20,000 roughly a month later. The rally was partly driven by CME Group’s announcement to launch the first bitcoin futures contracts in December 2017.
Enthusiasm for the original crypto cooled in 2018, with BTC prices dropping below $4,000.
2020 – 2024
The next notable bitcoin boom occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This time, BTC’s rise was partly driven by government shutdowns of sports, casinos, and other leisure and entertainment options and multiple rounds of government stimulus checks that left many Americans with extra disposable income.
But rising interest rates cooled investor enthusiasm in 2022, with a flight away from riskier assets like cryptocurrency.
Falling crypto prices in 2022 exposed overleverage among crypto lenders, hedge funds and exchanges. A string of crypto industry layoffs and bankruptcies weighed on bitcoin prices in 2022.
But it wasn’t too long before the original crypto began to rebound. Bitcoin’s rally resumed in 2023 and continues to climb.
On…
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