Frequently asked questions

It is digital money that runs on a public network with no company or government in charge, has a supply capped at 21 million coins, and can be sent to anyone, anywhere, without asking permission. The longer version is on What is bitcoin?

Someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, who published the design in October 2008, launched the network in January 2009 and stopped communicating in 2011. Nobody has proven who Satoshi was. Journalists and film-makers have named at least half a dozen candidates, all of whom denied it or had died. See the history and the people.

Nobody, in the sense of an owner. Developers propose changes, miners order transactions, and the tens of thousands of people running nodes decide which rules they will accept. A change only happens if nearly everyone opts in. The failed BIP-110 fork of August 2026 showed how hard it is to push through a change that lacks broad agreement.

It depends on which job of money you mean. Tens of millions of people hold it as savings, so it is used as a store of value, though a volatile one. It works as a means of payment, especially over Lightning, but relatively few people spend it day to day. Almost nothing is priced in it. Economists disagree about whether that makes it money, a commodity or something new; the economics page walks through the debate.

For the same broad reason anything used as money does: people want it and cannot easily make more. Supporters point to the fixed supply, resistance to seizure and censorship, and a 17-year record of working. Critics reply that it pays no income and is used mainly for speculation. The price is simply where those two views meet each day.

Yes. Each bitcoin divides into 100 million satoshis, and most people buy by the dollar amount, not by the coin. Try the sats converter.

More than 20 million had been mined by March 2026. The limit is just under 21 million, and the last fraction will not be issued until about 2140. The supply chart lets you slide through the whole schedule.

A lottery that anyone with hardware and electricity can enter. Miners bundle transactions into a block and then guess numbers, trillions of times a second, until the block’s hash comes out below a target. The winner adds the block and collects the reward. You can mine a toy block in your browser.

Every 210,000 blocks, about four years, the number of new coins created per block is cut in half. It began at 50 and is now 3.125. Halvings happened in 2012, 2016, 2020 and April 2024; the next is expected in 2028.

Miners will be paid only in transaction fees. That is about 114 years away, but the subsidy shrinks long before then, and whether fees will be enough to keep the network secure is one of the real open questions. See the security budget.

The network itself has never been hacked in the sense of coins being stolen by breaking its cryptography or rewriting its history. What gets hacked are the things around it: exchanges, wallets on infected computers, and people tricked into giving up their keys.

Technically, the rule is just code, and code can be edited. Practically, a change would need the people running nodes to install software that devalues their own holdings. There has never been a serious attempt, and the limit is the one rule almost every participant agrees on.

No. It is pseudonymous. Every transaction is public forever, linked to addresses rather than names. Once an address is tied to a person, for instance through an exchange’s identity checks, their history can often be traced. Privacy takes deliberate effort.

A block arrives about every ten minutes, and a payment with an adequate fee is usually in the next block or two. Many recipients wait for several confirmations for large amounts. Lightning payments settle in about a second.

Block space is limited, so transactions bid for it. When demand surges, fee rates rise; when it is quiet they fall to almost nothing. The live fee estimate is in the bar at the top of every page.

Not today, and not with any machine that exists. A large enough quantum computer could derive private keys from exposed public keys, and research in March 2026 lowered estimates of how large it would need to be. Developers are debating proposals, notably BIP-360, to add quantum-resistant addresses. See quantum risk.

Three main routes: a regulated exchange or broker app, a spot ETF in an ordinary brokerage account, or directly from another person. Each trades convenience against control. Buying and storing compares them without recommending any.

An ETF share is a regulated security that tracks the price; a custodian holds the coins and you cannot withdraw or spend them. Owning bitcoin directly means holding keys, with full control and full responsibility. The comparison table sets the two side by side.

A list of 12 or 24 words that encodes the master secret for a wallet. It is the wallet. Write it on paper or metal, keep it offline, and never type it into a website, a chat or a photo app. No legitimate company will ever ask for it.

That bitcoin left on an exchange is a promise from the exchange, not bitcoin in your possession. Mt. Gox in 2014 and FTX in 2022 are why people repeat it.

The coins stay where they are, visible to everyone and spendable by no one. There is no reset button. Estimates of permanently lost bitcoin run to several million coins.

There is no single answer and this site does not recommend products. The wallet guide describes the main types and their trade-offs, and a security checklist to work through.

In most countries, yes. In the United States it is treated as property, so selling, swapping or spending it can create a taxable gain or loss. Rules vary widely by country and change often; this is a general description, not tax advice.

As of early October 2026 the lowest standing sponsor fee among US spot funds was 0.14 percent and the highest 1.50 percent. The sortable table lists every fund, and the calculator shows what the differences add up to. Fees are one factor among several, including liquidity and spreads.

The supply cannot respond to demand, so every change in demand shows up entirely in price. Add a market that trades around the clock with heavy leverage, and no agreed way to value the asset, and large swings follow. Falls of more than 70 percent have happened several times.

Over its whole life it has far outpaced inflation. Over shorter periods it has often behaved like a risky technology stock, falling when interest rates rose in 2022 and again in the 2026 sell-off. The honest answer is: over a long enough horizon it has been, and in any given year it may not be.

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimated about 138 terawatt-hours a year in its 2025 report, roughly half a percent of world electricity use, with just over half from renewable and nuclear sources. Whether that is wasteful or worthwhile is a value judgement; both cases are laid out here.

No, though criminals do use it. Blockchain analytics firms consistently estimate that illicit activity is a small fraction of total crypto volume, and bitcoin’s public ledger makes it a poor tool for hiding money. Ransomware and scams remain real problems.

Probably Satoshi, with an estimated 1.1 million coins that have never moved. Among known entities the largest are the spot ETFs collectively, then Strategy with 848,000 BTC in October 2026, then the US and Chinese governments. See who owns bitcoin.

An executive order in March 2025 created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve out of coins the government had already seized, and directed that they not be sold. As of October 2026 no purchases had been reported, the government had not published a full audit, and a bill to make the reserve permanent had cleared a House committee but not become law.

It has been through at least five boom-and-bust cycles, each peaking higher than the last. Sceptics see repeated bubbles in something with no underlying cash flow; supporters see a new asset finding its price in fits and starts. Both are describing the same chart. This site makes no price predictions.

No. Bitcoin Unpacked is educational. It does not recommend buying, selling or holding anything, and it does not recommend particular funds, exchanges or wallets.

It is an independent site with no affiliation to any company, fund, project or person it mentions. It is part of a small network of plain-English explainers listed in the footer.

Price data comes from the CoinGecko public API. Block height, fees and hashrate come from mempool.space. They load in your browser, show the time they were last updated, and display “Live data unavailable” if a service cannot be reached.

The site was last fully reviewed in October 2026. Fast-moving figures, such as fund holdings, carry the date and source next to them. Everything used is listed on the sources page.

Check the dated source cited next to the claim first, since many figures change weekly. The sources page explains how numbers were chosen and what was left out because it could not be verified.