Bitcoin price and where to buy BTC

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency: a payment network and a fixed-supply asset with no company or central bank behind it. Miners secure the network with SHA-256 proof of work, a new block arrives about every 10 minutes, and the protocol caps the supply at 21 million coins.

Every exchange we track lists Bitcoin, and it carries more trading volume than any other asset in our database. That depth is why its price agrees across exchanges more closely than almost anything else we measure.

How to buy Bitcoin, step by step

1. Pick an exchange. Every exchange we track lists BTC. Compare fees, funding options and whether it serves your country in our exchange reviews.
2. Create and verify your account. Regulated exchanges ask for identity documents before you can deposit fiat.
3. Fund the account. A bank transfer or a stablecoin deposit usually costs far less than a card payment.
4. Buy BTC. Use the BTC/USD or BTC/USDT market. You can buy a fraction of a bitcoin. A market order fills at once; a limit order waits for the price you set.
5. Decide where to keep it. On the exchange is simplest, but the exchange then holds your coins. A Bitcoin wallet you control removes that risk; withdrawing costs a network fee that depends on how busy the network is.

Where to buy Bitcoin at the best price

The cheapest place to buy BTC is the venue in the table above marked cheapest, after you add its trading fee. On Bitcoin the price gap between exchanges is so small that the fee usually decides the result, not the price.

What you really pay comes down to three things:

• The price on that venue. The table shows every dollar-quoted market we track, with its gap to our composite.
• The trading fee. Spot fees differ by venue, by account tier and by whether your order adds or takes liquidity. Our fee comparison lists them side by side.
• How you fund the account. Card purchases often cost several percent more than a bank transfer or a stablecoin deposit. On Bitcoin that is a hundred times the typical price gap between exchanges.

Why the Bitcoin price differs between exchanges

Each exchange matches its own buyers and sellers, so each prints its own price. Arbitrage traders close the gaps, and on Bitcoin there are more of them than anywhere else. In our minute-by-minute measurement the gap between the highest and lowest venue averaged about 0.025 percent, and it went above half a percent in about one minute out of every ten thousand.

For comparison, Litecoin averaged about 0.06 percent and Dogecoin about 0.06 percent, with far more frequent spikes. The spread figure at the top of this page is the live version of that measurement. Our guide on why crypto prices differ between exchanges explains the mechanism.

What moves the Bitcoin price

Bitcoin sets the direction for most of the market rather than following it. In our hourly composite, Ethereum moved with Bitcoin at a correlation of about 0.86 and Solana at about 0.84, where 1 would mean identical moves. When Bitcoin makes a sharp move, most large coins make it in the same hour.

The fastest falls usually involve leverage: positions that are liquidated are sold at market, which pushes the price into the next liquidation. The funding rates on this page show how crowded the leveraged side is right now. Positive funding means longs are paying shorts to hold their positions.

Pros and cons of Bitcoin

Pros

• The deepest market in crypto: in our measurement its price agrees across exchanges more closely than almost any other asset.
• A fixed 21 million supply with a known issuance schedule.
• Listed on every exchange we track, and easy to buy in small fractions.
• The longest track record of any cryptocurrency.

Cons

• The price moves by several percent in a day, and it has fallen more than half from its peaks before.
• A block every 10 minutes makes base-layer payments slow and, when the network is busy, expensive.
• Self-custody is unforgiving: a lost key or a wrong address cannot be reversed.

How the Bitcoin halving works

Every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years, the reward miners receive for a new block halves. It started at 50 BTC and is now 3.125 BTC per block. The next halving cuts it to 1.5625 BTC, and the halvings continue until the 21 million cap is reached.

A halving reduces how fast new bitcoins appear. It does not change how many already exist, and it does not set the price. What it changes mechanically is how many new coins miners have to sell to cover their costs.

Bitcoin’s highest and lowest price

Bitcoin’s all-time high is about $126,000 on volume-weighted data, with single exchanges printing slightly higher at the peak. Its lowest price on the same kind of data is about $68, and the very first exchange trades happened at fractions of a dollar. The chart above covers the last 30 days of our composite, and the funding table shows whether leveraged traders are currently paying to be long or short.

Converting a specific amount? The BTC to USD converter applies our live price to any amount, down to single satoshis.