What Is Bitcoin: Statistics and Price Reaction
Bitcoin (BTC) is the first and largest cryptocurrency: digital money that no bank or government issues. There will never be more than 21 million coins, which is why bitcoin is called "digital gold". The price and events of the current day are on the Bitcoin today page.
This page is an in-depth study of Bitcoin: its history, key events, tokenomics, risks and how the price has reacted to news. No need to spend weeks researching the coin – the useful information is already collected and checked against primary sources.
Give the page 10 minutes to understand how Bitcoin works and how the service works. To keep your finger on the pulse, subscribe to the coin’s folder in the Telegram bot: important news, spikes and drops arrive as soon as the bot catches them. It helps you notice a serious event in time – the decision and the risk stay with you.
- Type
- Layer 1 blockchain, Proof of Work (SHA-256 mining)
- Creator
- Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym), whitepaper – Oct 31, 2008
- Maximum supply
- 21,000,000 BTC
- Block height
- 973,833
next event~Nov 13, 2026 – Difficulty adjustment (−4.2% expected)
statistics since tracking began
Bitcoin statistics on the site have been collected since October 29, 2026: how many stories there were per day, which sources write about bitcoin most often, after which level of news the price moved more, all spikes and drops. In a year there will be bitcoin statistics for the year, then for the whole period of observation. Comparison with all coins is in the Data section, the formulas are in the methodology.
What moved the price
Spikes and drops
Show all spikes and drops
Which source tier moves the price
Who writes about the coin most often
All days
last 7 days, the rest under the buttonShow all days
news with the price reaction
Next to each story is the change in the BTC price 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours and 24 hours after it was first published. A bitcoin day counts as notable if the price moved more than 2% in 24 hours. The bot marks a spike or a drop when the price moved in an hour clearly more than it usually moves in a week, and shows the news from three hours before and three hours after.
If the bitcoin price moved but there is no notable news about it, check the Market page: the Fed, regulators and exchanges affect all coins at once. We write "coincided with the news", not "rose because of the news": timing alone is not proof.
Bitcoin: summary and history
In the bot, Bitcoin is the benchmark: every other coin is compared with its move, so BTC has no "own move" – its reaction is counted as a plain price change. Every morning yesterday's recap appears here: the price, the top stories, spikes and drops.
What bitcoin is, how it works and who holds it – in the guide "What is Bitcoin, explained simply".
Summary change log
In brief: the essentials about the coin in plain words
Bitcoin statistics and analysis
Bitcoin analysis here means measurements, not forecasts. In 2026 data, BTC moves most often coincided with three groups of events: Fed rate decisions and expectations, money flowing in and out of bitcoin ETFs, and laws and regulator decisions in the US. That is why the bot flags such stories first.
Upcoming dates: a mining difficulty adjustment around November 13, 2026, Fed decisions on schedule, the full Senate vote on the US crypto market structure law (no date yet) and the next halving – around April 2028.
Where the bot gets bitcoin data
Bitcoin has no company and no official blog. The bot has two sources of its own for it: Bitcoin Core software releases and the account of Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin. The rest are 25 shared sources: major outlets like CoinDesk and The Block, large news Telegram channels, YouTube, Google News. The bot merges reprints: if eight outlets wrote about an inflow into bitcoin ETFs, it is one story with eight links.
Bitcoin has its own folder in the Telegram bot @invest_prs_bot. The result of the past day is on the What happened to Bitcoin in 24 hours page.
What is Bitcoin, explained simply
Bitcoin (BTC) is the first and largest cryptocurrency. It is digital money that no bank or government issues. All transfers are recorded in a shared database – the blockchain – and thousands of computers around the world keep a copy of it. Faking a record or reversing a transfer after the fact is practically impossible.
Bitcoin's main feature is its limited supply. There will never be more than 21 million coins. As of October 30, 2026, 20,105,365 BTC have been mined, which is 95.7% of the limit. So bitcoin is often called "digital gold": you cannot "print" more of it than the rules allow.
The shortest answer to "what is bitcoin": it is an open network for sending money without a middleman, and at the same time an asset people buy as a long-term investment. Today it is the second part that moves its price the most.
Who created Bitcoin
Bitcoin was invented by a person or a group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The description of the system (the whitepaper) came out on October 31, 2008, and the first block of the network appeared on January 3, 2009. Who is really behind the name is still unknown – and this is one of the reasons bitcoin has no company, no leader and no official blog.
The network is developed by independent developers. Its main program is Bitcoin Core, and the bot tracks its releases as an official source.
How does Bitcoin work
Transfers in the network are collected into blocks. A new block is added about every 10 minutes, about 144 blocks a day. Transfers are checked and blocks are added by miners: computers that solve a hard computing task. This method is called Proof of Work.
For each block a miner gets a reward in new coins. Right now it is 3.125 BTC per block, about 450 BTC a day. This is where bitcoin's inflation comes from – about 0.8% a year, and every four years it falls by half.
The network's power (hashrate) at the end of October 2026 is about 1,042 exahashes per second, a record level. The higher the power, the more expensive it is to attack the network. Transfer fees are very low right now – 1–6 satoshi per byte (a satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin).
There is also a weak spot. Mining is concentrated in a few large pools – groups of miners. In the week before October 30, 2026, Foundry mined 26.3% of blocks, AntPool 20.8% and F2Pool 17.0%. The two largest pools together – 47%.
Halving: why there are fewer and fewer new coins
Every 210,000 blocks, about once every four years, the miners' reward falls by half. This is called the halving. The reward has already gone 50 → 25 → 12.5 → 6.25 → 3.125 BTC. The last halving was on April 20, 2024, at block 840,000.
The next one is expected at block 1,050,000 – around April 2028. Historically the market grew before and after halvings, but this is an observation, not a law.
Bitcoin history in numbers
Bitcoin history is a history of sharp cycles. Here is the price by year according to the Binance exchange (BTC to dollar trading there started in August 2017):
| Year | High | Low | Close | For the year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 (from Aug) | $19,799 | $2,817 | $13,716 | +222% |
| 2018 | $17,176 | $3,156 | $3,703 | −73% |
| 2019 | $13,970 | $3,350 | $7,195 | +94% |
| 2020 | $29,300 | $3,782 | $28,924 | +302% |
| 2021 | $69,000 | $28,130 | $46,217 | +60% |
| 2022 | $48,190 | $15,476 | $16,542 | −64% |
| 2023 | $44,700 | $16,499 | $42,284 | +156% |
| 2024 | $108,353 | $38,555 | $93,576 | +121% |
| 2025 | $126,200 | $74,508 | $87,648 | −6% |
| 2026 (as of Oct 30) | $97,924 | $57,800 | ~$77,500 | −12% |
Key events of recent years:
- January 11, 2024 – trading in spot bitcoin ETFs started in the US: exchange-traded funds that let you buy bitcoin with a regular brokerage account.
- March 6, 2025 – the executive order on the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: the government does not sell about 200,000 seized BTC.
- October 6, 2025 – all-time high of $126,080 (per CoinGecko).
- November 2025 – January 2026 – more than $12 billion left the ETFs; according to the media, this coincided with the crash.
- February 5–6, 2026 – minus 14.0% in a day, then plus 12.2%.
- May 2026 – the CLARITY Act, the crypto market structure law, passed the US Senate Banking Committee (15 votes to 9), but never reached a vote of the full Senate (TFTC).
- June–July 2026 – the bottom of the year: $57,800 on Binance.
A personal note. Once, when bitcoin cost about 30,000 rubles per coin, I thought about buying four and got scared: I decided it was a scam. What happened to bitcoin next and what it is worth now, everyone knows. At its peak it cost more than $100,000. I do not mean I should have bought. I mean that back then I did not understand what was going on and decided at random. This page is here so that it does not happen again.
Bitcoin now: the market on October 30, 2026
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Price | $77,165 |
| Market cap | $1.551 trillion, rank #1 |
| 24-hour trading volume | $174.4 billion |
| 7 days / 30 days / year | −5.5% / −7.9% / −28.8% |
| From all-time high | −38.8% |
| Share of the whole crypto market | 59.1% (whole market – $2.62 trillion) |
Data: CoinGecko as of October 30, 2026. The current price and yesterday's move are on the bitcoin news page.
Who holds bitcoin
Bitcoin has long stopped being a coin only for enthusiasts. Today the largest holders are funds and companies.
- Bitcoin ETFs in the US hold $104.27 billion in bitcoin – 6.58% of the market cap. Total net inflow – $57.62 billion. The largest fund is IBIT from BlackRock ($65.79 billion), followed by FBTC from Fidelity ($14.24 billion) and GBTC from Grayscale ($10.11 billion). Data as of October 29, 2026.
- The company Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) – 848,517 BTC, about 4.2% of all coins. In October 2026 it bought a little: 250 BTC in the week of October 5–11. Its founder Michael Saylor is one of the bot's sources on X.
- Public companies together – about 1.23–1.29 million BTC, 5.9–6.4% of the supply.
- The US government – a reserve of about 200,000 seized BTC. The law on adding to it depends on the CLARITY Act.
The fund and company figures come from secondary sources (SoSoValue, company reports as retold by the media) and will be checked against primary sources when the guide is updated.
What moves the bitcoin price
In 2026, bitcoin moves most often coincided with three groups of news:
- The Fed rate. Expectations of a tight policy coincided with drops.
- Flows into bitcoin ETFs. Money coming into and leaving the funds is one of the main factors of 2025–2026.
- Regulation in the US. Crypto laws and regulator decisions. An example is the CLARITY Act, the crypto market structure law: in May 2026 it passed a Senate committee, but did not reach a vote of the full Senate.
Bitcoin also moves the rest of the market. By a calculation for 2025–2026, Solana's correlation with it is 0.83–0.87, XRP's – 0.87–0.89: when bitcoin moves, they almost always follow it, and harder. That is why the bot takes BTC's move out of other coins' moves, to see their reaction to their own news.
Remember the main rule of the service: timing alone does not prove cause. We write "coincided with the news", not "fell because of the news".
Why bitcoin is the benchmark for the whole market
Bitcoin makes up 59% of the value of the whole crypto market. When the market is afraid, money more often moves from other coins into bitcoin, not the other way round. And almost all large coins move after it.
How strongly – two numbers show it. Correlation shows how often coins move in the same direction (1 – always together, 0 – independently). Beta shows how many times stronger a coin moves compared with bitcoin. By a calculation for 2025–2026:
| Coin | Correlation with BTC | Beta to BTC |
|---|---|---|
| XRP | 0.87–0.89 | 1.26–1.62 |
| Solana | 0.83–0.87 | about 1.25 |
| Toncoin (GRAM) | 0.58 | about 0.86 |
A beta of 1.6 for XRP means: if bitcoin falls by 1%, XRP falls by 1.6% on average. So when you read the news of any coin, first look at what bitcoin did. The service does it automatically: in the recaps of other coins, bitcoin's move is already taken out.
Bitcoin ETFs explained simply
An ETF is an exchange-traded fund. A person buys a share of it with a regular brokerage account, like a stock, and the fund holds real bitcoins with that money. The buyer does not need a wallet, keys or a crypto exchange.
For bitcoin this changed a lot. Since January 2024, pension funds, banks and regular investors who never dealt with crypto exchanges came into bitcoin through ETFs. As of October 29, 2026, US funds hold $104 billion in bitcoin. So news about money flowing into and out of ETFs became some of the most important for the price: behind it is money that comes and goes fast.
At the end of October 2026 there was an inflow, but a small one: the fourth day in a row, only about $17 million in total. For comparison: from November 2025 to January 2026, more than $12 billion left the funds.
Calendar: what is ahead for bitcoin
| When | What | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| around 13.11.2026 | Mining difficulty adjustment, expected −4.2% | Slightly easier for miners, almost no effect on the price |
| every day | Money flows into bitcoin ETFs | One of the main price factors in 2025–2026 |
| on the Fed schedule | US rate decisions | Tight Fed policy in 2026 coincided with drops |
| no date | Full Senate vote on the CLARITY Act | Adding to the US government reserve depends on it |
| around April 2028 | Next halving | Half as many new coins will appear |
Bitcoin risks
- Bear trend. At the end of October 2026 the price is 39% below the high, minus 8% over 30 days.
- Dependence on the Fed and ETFs. Large outflows from the funds have already coincided with crashes.
- Concentration at Strategy. 4.2% of all coins sit with one company which, according to the media, buys them with borrowed money. If it has to sell, it will hit the market.
- Regulation in the US. The market structure law is stuck: it did not reach a vote of the full Senate.
- Mining concentration. Two pools mine almost half of the blocks.
- Miner economics. Fees are almost zero, and after 2028 the reward will be cut in half again.
Guide sources
- CoinGecko – Bitcoin
- mempool.space – network, hashrate, pools
- TokenPost – bitcoin ETF assets
- bitcoin.com – Strategy holdings
- Yahoo Finance – bitcoin and the CLARITY Act
- TFTC – CLARITY Act and the US bitcoin reserve
- TFTC – bitcoin ETF flows
Day archive and guide updates
The results of all past days are in the calendar on this page, the price and events of the current day are on the Bitcoin today page.
Guide: snapshot of October 30, 2026 · Vitaly Lapin. The guide is updated once a month: each version has a snapshot date, and old numbers are not changed after the fact. It does not suggest money decisions – it is a collection of facts.
Frequently asked questions
01What is bitcoin, in simple words?
The first and largest cryptocurrency: digital money without a bank in the middle. There will never be more than 21 million coins; as of 30.10.2026, 20.1 million have been mined.
02What is bitcoin used for?
For transfers without a middleman and as a long-term investment – "digital gold". Today it is held by exchange-traded funds, companies and the US government.
03Who created bitcoin?
A person or a group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The description of the system came out on October 31, 2008, the first block on January 3, 2009. Who it really is, is unknown.
04How does bitcoin work?
Transfers are collected into blocks about every 10 minutes. Miners check them and get a reward – now 3.125 BTC per block.
05How many bitcoins are there?
The limit is 21 million. As of October 30, 2026, 20,105,365 BTC have been mined, about 95.7%.
06When is the next bitcoin halving?
It is expected at block 1,050,000 – around April 2028. The block reward will fall from 3.125 to 1.5625 BTC.
07What is the bitcoin all-time high?
$126,080 – October 6, 2025, per CoinGecko. On October 30, 2026, the price was 38.8% lower.
08Bitcoin history: how did it all start?
Bitcoin history began on October 31, 2008, with the system description by Satoshi Nakamoto; the first block came out on January 3, 2009. The all-time high is $126,080, on October 6, 2025.
09What moves the bitcoin price?
In 2026, its moves most often coincided with Fed decisions, money flows into bitcoin ETFs and regulation in the US.
10Where can I see bitcoin statistics?
In the statistics block on this page: stories, sources, spikes and drops since October 29, 2026. Comparison with other coins is in the Data section.
11Is there bitcoin analysis here without forecasts?
Yes, that is all there is: measurements of the price reaction to news, spikes and sources. The site does not make price forecasts.
12What is a bitcoin spike?
An hour when the price moved clearly more than it usually moves in a week. Next to it the bot shows the news from three hours before and three hours after.