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What Is the Price of Bitcoin Today?
Bitcoin (BTC) traded at $115,850 as of 9:19 a.m. ET. That’s down 2.05% over the past 24 hours and up 22.70% year to date. The original crypto’s 52-week intraday high clocked in at $123,092 on July 14, 2025, while its 52-week intraday low of $49,121 occurred on August 5, 2024.
By comparison, Ethereum (ETH) trades at $3,668, with a 24-hour change of -4% and a year-to-date change of 9%.
History of Bitcoin Prices
Year to date, bitcoin is up 22.70%, posting a 22.7% gain over the past 12 months.
Since bitcoin’s launch 16 years ago, the world’s first cryptocurrency has completely shifted global financial markets and amassed $2.31 trillion in market capitalization.
Read more: Top 10 Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin Price Chart
The chart above reflects daily data and does not include intraday highs or lows.
What Is Bitcoin?
Since its introduction in 2009 by an anonymous figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin, as the first cryptocurrency, has paved the way for many others. It kicked off a whole new era in digital finance.
To put it simply, bitcoin is a digital currency. It’s one way for you to send or receive payments digitally without relying on a centralized financial institution, such as a bank. In other words, digital transactions can happen between different people anywhere in the world without intermediaries slowing things down.
Bitcoin is one of the most successful “real-world” applications of blockchain technology, a decentralized public ledger maintained by a network of users. Key to its application is its proof-of-work model. It’s a consensus method that also uses cryptography, replacing the need for a centralized authority to approve transactions.
For its proof-of-work consensus mechanism, miners validate coin transactions by using powerful computers to solve complex mathematical problems. The process then adds new blocks of verified data to the blockchain. Each block connects to the one before it. This creates a secure and traceable chain of transactions, making it difficult to tamper with.
Bitcoin miners currently receive 3.125 BTC—worth $362,031—for each new block they validate. However, it is worth noting that this reward halves around every four years, and crypto mining requires a significant amount of computer processing power.
How Is Bitcoin’s Price Determined?
For scarcity, bitcoin has a capped supply of 21 million coins. As of August 1, 2025, there are 19.90 million bitcoins in circulation.
Bitcoin is often dubbed digital gold, and some of its constructs are to mimic it in terms of creating scarcity. Given bitcoin’s fixed supply, that in part creates demand, affecting its price.
In the world of investing, bitcoin is classified as an independent asset class. Other examples of alternative assets include investing in real estate, farmland, gold, silver and other commodities, to name a few.
Because bitcoin doesn’t represent ownership of physical assets or generate earnings, revenue or cash flow, its price is determined exclusively by supply and demand.
Investor sentiment, economic conditions and public perceptions drive demand. In recent years, bitcoin has become increasingly validated as an asset due to its growing institutional adoption.
According to a 2024 study conducted by Fidelity Digital Assets, 67% of institutional investors saw a place for digital assets like bitcoin within investment portfolios.
What makes [bitcoin] even more of a no-brainer is the fact that institutions like MicroStrategy, BlackRock and even sovereign wealth funds are buying and holding. Michael Saylor isn’t crazy—he’s early. We’re also seeing governments starting to consider bitcoin as a potential reserve asset, which is monumental. This is no longer a niche idea,” says Pablo Gerboles Parrilla, director of Alive DevOps, a software development company that works with blockchain technology.
Bitcoin’s track record is still too short to call it an inflation hedge. However, it does show characteristics of a hedge-like asset, particularly when traditional markets experience price declines.
A May 2023 S&P Global report titled “Are Crypto Markets Correlated With Macroeconomic Factors?” found that key drivers for crypto performance include market confidence, adoption, technology developments and liquidity conditions.
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 less than a tenth of a cent.
The first known bitcoin commercial transaction occurred when a Florida software engineer traded two Papa John’s pizzas (worth about $41 at the time) for 10,000 bitcoins on May 22, 2010. That day is now commemorated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
As of August 1, 2025, that famous bitcoin pizza transaction is worth a staggering $1,158,498,012.
Bitcoin Halving Dates
Since the launch of bitcoin in January 2009, a halving event has only occurred four times. Each time 210,000 blocks of transactions are added to the bitcoin blockchain, the network automatically undergoes a process known as halving.
Bitcoin miners receive a set amount of BTC as a reward for their services in validating a block. But that reward is cut in half each time a halving occurs. In other words, about once every four years, bitcoin miners receive a 50% pay cut.
Bitcoin halving is a crucial aspect of limiting bitcoin’s supply and theoretically supporting its price.
Does Bitcoin Halving Increase BTC’s Price?
Generally, bitcoin experiences a bullish rally following a halving. The proof is in the pudding when we look at the historical data.
The table below shows positive double-digit gains or more one year after each halving.
How To Buy Bitcoin
You can purchase bitcoin through well-known cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance.US, Coinbase and Kraken. If you don’t already have an account for purchasing bitcoin, the steps will look something like this:
- Set up an account. You’ll create an account and typically complete an identity verification process, known as Know Your Customer (KYC), before you can trade. Typically, this involves providing personal information like your full name, date of birth, address and other identifying information.
- Choose your order type. Most exchanges offer different order types similar to traditional broker-dealers. You can place a market order, the current price or a limit order, where you specify the price you want to execute your purchase.
- Enter the amount you wish to buy. Enter the amount you wish to buy or how much you want to spend. Most exchanges offer fractional shares of bitcoins. You can start with as little as a few dollars and whatever the minimum amount the exchange requires.
- Review your order details and submit. This is pretty straightforward, you’ll review your order and make sure it’s all correct before hitting submit.
- Order confirmation. Once your order is executed, you’ll receive a confirmation and the specified bitcoin amount will be credited to your account.
- Storage. Most exchanges offer an exchange wallet, but you can look for other options. When buying bitcoin directly, investors need to store their BTC in a digital wallet, much like keeping cash in a physical wallet. In this case, the wallet securely holds the private keys required to send or receive bitcoin.
Bitcoin wallets come in two main forms: hot and cold. Hot wallets are online or exchange wallets, and cold wallets are generally hardware-based—they can often look like USB drives.
Read more: Best Crypto Wallets
Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs)
Beyond purchasing bitcoin directly, investors can also gain exposure to the bitcoin market through bitcoin-focused investment funds.
In January 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved multiple spot bitcoin ETFs—funds that hold actual bitcoin rather than futures contracts and trade on major U.S. exchanges.
This approval signaled a significant milestone for the cryptocurrency, offering institutional legitimacy and advancing it beyond its early image as a purely speculative and volatile asset.
As of the time of this writing, the most popular bitcoin ETFs by assets under management are iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin (FBTC), which launched a day after the SEC approved bitcoin spot ETFs, as well as the ever-popular Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC).
After the SEC’s landmark ruling, GBTC was converted into an ETF. Before that, GBTC was a publicly traded vehicle offering exposure to bitcoin, with a high expense ratio of 2%. The conversion reduced expense ratios on the fund to 1.5%, which is still higher than Fidelity’s FBTC and BlackRock’s IBIT, both at 0.25%.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
One BTC equals one bitcoin, currently valued at $115,850. Unlike fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar, which can be printed at will by central banks, bitcoin has a fixed supply capped at 21 million coins. Currently, there are 19.90 million bitcoins in circulation.