Bitcoin (BTC) News & Data

Bitcoin is the first and largest cryptocurrency — a decentralised digital money that runs on an open, global network rather than through a bank or government. Launched in 2009 from a white paper published under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, it introduced a way to transfer value over the internet without a trusted middleman. This page explains what Bitcoin is, how its network works, why its supply is capped, and where to track it on TBN Express.

What Bitcoin actually is

At its core, Bitcoin is a shared public ledger — the blockchain — that records every transaction ever made. Copies of that ledger are held by thousands of independent computers worldwide, so no single party controls it. You hold bitcoin through a wallet that stores the private keys proving ownership; sending bitcoin means signing a transaction with those keys. Because the rules are enforced by software and consensus rather than an institution, Bitcoin is often described as “permissionless”: anyone can use it without asking for approval.

How the network works

New transactions are grouped into blocks roughly every ten minutes. “Miners” compete to add the next block by spending computing power to solve a cryptographic puzzle — a process called proof of work. The winning miner is rewarded with newly issued bitcoin plus transaction fees. This design makes rewriting history prohibitively expensive, which is what secures the ledger. If the terms here are new to you, our glossary defines them in plain English.

Supply: the 21 million cap and halvings

Bitcoin’s monetary policy is fixed in code. No more than 21 million coins will ever exist, and the rate of new issuance is cut in half roughly every four years in an event known as the “halving”. This predictable, shrinking issuance is central to the argument that Bitcoin is a scarce, “hard” asset — though scarcity alone does not guarantee price appreciation.

What moves the price

Bitcoin’s price reflects supply and demand across global markets, shaped by factors such as macro conditions, liquidity, adoption, regulation, and overall market sentiment. There is no single “official” price — exchanges quote slightly different figures. The live prices below are pulled from market data and update automatically.

You can convert any amount with our crypto converter, and model a hypothetical entry and exit with the profit/loss calculator or ROI calculator.

Track Bitcoin on TBN Express

Follow Bitcoin alongside the rest of the market through our live market data, check the day’s mood on the Fear & Greed Index, and learn the figures on every coin page in our guide to reading a market page. To understand how Bitcoin relates to the wider ecosystem, see Ethereum, altcoins and stablecoins.

Wallets, keys and self-custody

Owning bitcoin really means controlling a private key — a secret number that authorises spending. Keys live in a wallet, and wallets fall into two camps. A custodial wallet (typically an exchange account) holds the keys on your behalf, which is convenient but means trusting a third party. A non-custodial wallet puts the keys in your hands alone, usually protected by a 12- or 24-word recovery phrase. The trade-off is responsibility: if you lose that phrase, no one can restore access. The phrase “not your keys, not your coins” captures the point — whoever holds the keys controls the funds.

Fees and confirmation times

Every transaction pays a fee to the miners who include it in a block. Fees are set by a market: when the network is busy and the queue of pending transactions (the “mempool”) is full, fees rise; when activity is quiet, they fall. Because blocks are found roughly every ten minutes, a transaction is usually considered settled after one confirmation and increasingly secure with each block built on top. There is no customer-service line to speed a payment up — attaching a higher fee is the only way to ask miners to prioritise it.

Scaling and the Lightning Network

The base Bitcoin network deliberately limits how much data each block can carry, which caps how many transactions it can settle per second. To handle faster, cheaper, everyday payments, developers built the Lightning Network, a “layer 2” that settles many small transfers off-chain and records the net result on the main chain. Bitcoin is also highly divisible: a single coin splits into 100,000,000 units called satoshis, so you never need to buy a whole bitcoin to use the network.

Common misconceptions

Two ideas trip people up most often. First, Bitcoin is not anonymous — it is pseudonymous, with every transaction permanently visible on the public ledger and tied to addresses that analysis can sometimes link to real identities. Second, there is no “undo” button: a confirmed transaction sent to the wrong address generally cannot be reversed. Treat irreversibility and self-responsibility as core features of the system, not bugs.

Frequently asked questions