Bitcoin (BTC) Price — Buy & Swap BTC

How does Bitcoin work?

Transactions are grouped into blocks and confirmed by miners who compete to solve cryptographic puzzles, making the ledger extremely costly to tamper with. Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million coins, and roughly every four years a 'halving' cuts the rate of new issuance — a key driver behind its scarcity narrative.

What is Bitcoin used for?

BTC is held as a long-term store of value (often called 'digital gold'), used for global peer-to-peer payments, and treated as the benchmark asset of the entire crypto market. It trades 24/7 and is the most liquid cryptocurrency in existence.

How to buy or swap BTC

1. Pick BTC as the asset you want to receive.
2. Choose what you're paying with — crypto or a fiat card.
3. Monivo compares every connected exchange and routes your order to the best available rate.
4. Paste your wallet address and confirm — funds arrive in minutes.

Why Bitcoin exists at all

Bitcoin's founding document opens not with technology but with a complaint about institutions. Commerce on the internet, it argues, depends almost entirely on financial institutions acting as trusted third parties, and that dependence carries an unavoidable cost: mediation expense, minimum practical payment sizes, and reversible transactions that force merchants to collect more information about customers than they need.

The paper's contribution was a way to settle payments in a fixed order without anyone being in charge of that order. Mining is not there to create coins; the coins are the bribe that makes strangers keep the clock honest.

The people behind it

The whitepaper was published under the name Satoshi Nakamoto on the Cryptography mailing list on 31 October 2008, and the first software release followed on the same list about ten weeks later. The identity behind the name has never been established, and Monivo takes no position on the many candidates named over the years.

What is documented is the intellectual lineage. Before publication, Nakamoto was pointed to Wei Dai's b-money and cited Adam Back's Hashcash — the proof-of-work scheme originally designed to price email spam. Bitcoin's novelty was less in its parts than in how it combined them.

The original bet

The bet was that scarcity and settlement could be enforced by arithmetic instead of by law. If the cost of rewriting history is real electricity, and if honest mining is more profitable than attacking, then a ledger held by strangers becomes expensive to falsify without anyone needing permission to join.

The second, quieter bet was conservatism. Bitcoin's scripting language was deliberately limited: fewer capabilities meant fewer ways to break a system that was meant to hold savings.

The turning point

The decisive event in Bitcoin's history was not a hack but an argument. Between 2015 and 2017 the network split into camps over how big a block should be. One side pushed larger blocks and shipped alternative clients; the other backed Segregated Witness as a soft fork, and eventually a user-activated soft fork (BIP148) designed to make holdouts irrelevant.

The compromise hard fork known as SegWit2x was called off days before its scheduled activation, its backers concluding there was not enough consensus to proceed. The dispute left a permanent chain split behind it — Bitcoin Cash — and demonstrated that Bitcoin has no formal voting mechanism at all. Changes happen when miners, node operators, businesses and users converge, and stall when they do not.

A detail most summaries leave out

The phrase most often used to describe Bitcoin's achievement — solving the Byzantine Generals Problem — appears nowhere in the whitepaper. It entered the conversation through a sceptical mailing-list reply, which Nakamoto answered with a worked example in the same thread. The canonical framing of Bitcoin was, in other words, supplied by a critic.

The question that is still open

The block-size question was settled politically, not technically. Bigger blocks mean cheaper transactions and more throughput; they also raise the cost of running a full node, which concentrates verification among fewer participants. Bitcoin chose small blocks and pushed volume toward second layers, accepting higher on-chain fees during congestion as the price of keeping validation cheap. Whether that trade holds as block subsidies shrink toward zero is still genuinely open.

What this means when you swap BTC

Blocks target ten minutes, so confirmation is probabilistic rather than instant; most exchanges credit deposits after a handful of confirmations, and Monivo's providers publish their own thresholds per order. Fees are bid per transaction in satoshis per virtual byte and rise sharply when the mempool fills — underpaying does not fail the transfer, it just leaves it waiting.

Bitcoin has no memo or destination tag: an address is the whole instruction. Three address formats coexist (legacy `1…`, P2SH `3…` and native SegWit `bc1…`) and all are valid Bitcoin addresses, but a BTC send to an address from another chain is not recoverable. Native SegWit addresses usually settle cheapest because they weigh less.