Bitcoin (BTC) is the first and largest decentralized cryptocurrency, created in 2009 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. It allows peer-to-peer value transfer without banks, governments, or any central authority.
Bitcoin runs on a blockchain, which is a public ledger shared across thousands of computers worldwide. When someone sends BTC, that transaction is broadcast to the network and lands in the mempool, where it waits to be picked up by miners. Miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle (proof of work), and the winner adds a new block of transactions to the chain. The miner earns a block reward in BTC for their effort.
The total supply of Bitcoin is hard-capped at 21 million coins. New BTC enters circulation through mining, but the reward is cut in half roughly every four years in an event called the halving. This built-in scarcity is one of the main reasons people treat Bitcoin as a store of value, sometimes called "digital gold." Transactions are verified by the network itself, not a bank, which makes the system censorship-resistant and borderless.
Bitcoin is the benchmark for the entire cryptocurrency market. Its price drives sentiment across thousands of other tokens, and its hashrate is often cited as a proxy for network security. For traders, BTC price movements set the tone for everything from altcoin rallies to risk-off selloffs. For developers, the Bitcoin protocol introduced concepts (blockchain, proof of work, decentralized consensus) that underpin most of crypto.
The TerminalFeed dashboard features a dedicated BTC Price panel with live updates from Binance (every 1 second on desktop, 3 seconds on mobile). You can also track the mempool, block height, and network fees in the BTC Network panel, and watch large transactions in the Whale Watch panel. For deeper context, read our Bitcoin Mempool guide and the Fear and Greed Index explainer.