Bitcoin price today: BTC is trading at $60,078.74 (2024)

What is the price of bitcoin today?

Bitcoin, or 1 BTC, traded at $60,078.74 as of 8 a.m. ET. The highest intraday price the crypto reached in the past year was $73,750.07 on March 14, 2024.

Bitcoin chart

The chart above is pulling data as of 8 a.m. ET daily and doesn’t display intraday highs or lows.

Bitcoin prices

*The return comparisons are as of 8 a.m. ET.

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 120% year over year.

The original crypto had humble beginnings in January 2009. Today, it has a market cap of $1.19 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 runs on a groundbreaking blockchain-based network powered by a collection of global users. It allows anyone with internet access worldwide to make financial transactions that completely circumvent banks or other financial or government intermediaries.

Bitcoin’s security system is centered on its cryptography. All bitcoin transactions are validated by miners, who use high-powered computers to solve complex mathematical puzzles and create new blocks of verified transactions on the blockchain.

Since its launch, bitcoin has inspired thousands of other cryptocurrencies. While many additional cryptocurrencies have become successful, bitcoin remains the most valuable and popular globally.

How is bitcoin’s price determined?

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 halvings

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 to validate a block. But that reward is cut in half each time a halving occurs. In other words, about once every four years, bitcoin miners get a 50% pay cut.

Bitcoin halving is essential in limiting bitcoin’s supply and theoretically supporting its price.

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.

A history of bitcoin prices

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 online

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)