What is the price of bitcoin today?
The price of bitcoin, or 1 BTC, traded at $56,995.51, as of 8 a.m. ET. The highest intraday price that the original crypto reached in the past year was $73,750.07 on March 14, 2024.
Bitcoin price chart
The chart above pulls data as of 8 a.m. ET daily and doesn’t display intraday highs or lows.
Bitcoin prices
Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $73,750.07 on March 14, 2024. The lowest intraday price it traded in the past year was $24,930.30 on Sep. 11, 2023. Bitcoin is up 94% year over year.
The original cryptocurrency debuted in January 2009. It’s now a major asset with a market cap of $1.13 trillion.
Bitcoin has become a popular alternative to government-backed fiat currencies, which tend to lose value over time due to inflation.
What is bitcoin?
Bitcoin is known for its blockchain network and decentralized ledger that tracks transactions. The crypto has been used throughout the financial industry. Its network allows users to make transactions without a major bank or government intermediary.
Transactions are recorded on the blockchain and visible to everyone. Miners maintain the blockchain by solving complex math problems to validate transactions. This creates new blocks on the blockchain. Miners receive BTC payments for their work.
Bitcoin became a proof-of-concept mechanism that led to thousands of imitators. Since its launch, thousands of cryptos have come onto the scene.
What determines bitcoin’s price?
Bitcoin prices aren’t connected to tangible assets. They depend entirely on supply and demand.
New bitcoin is released to miners when they verify transactions. The total supply is capped at 21 million BTC.
With a fixed supply, increased demand can drive prices upward. Demand depends on investor sentiment, which explains the crypto’s volatility.
Bitcoin’s starting price
The first bitcoin transaction occurred in late 2009, when 5,050 BTC traded for $5.02. At the time, the price of 1 BTC was about a tenth of a cent.
Bitcoin halvings
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?
Less new bitcoin should ostensibly push up prices. But that doesn’t always happen.
A halving doesn’t directly impact prices, so it isn’t a guaranteed bullish catalyst. In the past, BTC prices hit a bottom about a year before the next halving. They then rose for more than a year after the halving. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the pattern will repeat.
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 March 14, 2024, bitcoin reached an all-time intraday high of $73,750.07.
How to buy bitcoin
Investors can buy bitcoin on popular cryptocurrency exchanges, such as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.
Any investor buying bitcoin directly must store their BTC in a bitcoin wallet. It’s similar to storing paper money in a physical wallet. In this case, bitcoin investors store the privacy keys needed to send or receive cryptocurrency in the wallet.
Bitcoin wallets can be hardware wallets that resemble USB sticks or software wallet apps that store BTC on a smartphone or another device.
Hot wallets are bitcoin wallets that are connected to the internet. In contrast, cold wallets are not connected to the internet. Hot wallets are considered more convenient than cold ones but riskier because of online access.
Read more: How to buy bitcoin
Bitcoin ETFs
In addition to buying bitcoin directly, investors can indirectly speculate on the bitcoin market via bitcoin funds.
In January 2024, the SEC also approved several bitcoin spot ETFs. These funds hold the cryptocurrency rather than crypto futures contracts and trade on major U.S. exchanges.
The approval of bitcoin exchange-traded funds represents a resounding institutional validation of the cryptocurrency, marking a departure from its initial reputation as a speculative and volatile asset.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Bitcoin is identified with a ticker just like a stock. Traders use BTC to identify bitcoin on exchanges. One BTC equals one bitcoin.
The value of one BTC was $56,995.51 as of 8 a.m. E.T.
