Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $79,648, down 0.95% in the last 24 hours. Over the last week it has traded between $79,548 and $80,449. It is a fixed-supply, politically neutral money that no company or government issues or can inflate.
What Bitcoin is
Bitcoin trades under the ticker BTC. Stripped of the price chart, it is a bet on one specific idea: a fixed-supply, politically neutral money that no company or government issues or can inflate.
The mechanism behind it is proof-of-work mining, where energy expenditure secures the ledger and issuance halves roughly every four years until it stops entirely. That matters more than most holders realise, because the mechanism decides who has power over the network, what it would cost to attack, and where new supply comes from. Two assets at the same price with different mechanisms are not comparable investments.
A useful discipline before buying: write the thesis down in one sentence. If you cannot, you are trading BTC's price rather than investing in it — both are legitimate, but they demand completely different behaviour when the position moves against you.
BTC price today and its recent range
BTC is currently $79,648. Over the period covered by the chart above it has ranged from $79,548 to $80,449, which puts it roughly 23% of the way up that range — near the bottom of it.
Read against the range rather than against a round number. The distance from the recent high (-0.87%) tells you more about where sentiment sits than the raw price does, and it is the figure that should inform where you put an alert.
What actually moves the BTC price
Price here is three clocks running at once: the whole market on the fastest, Bitcoin's own fundamentals on the slowest, and forced liquidation somewhere in between — which is why a violent move can carry no information about the project at all.
Bitcoin specifically: it is the market's reserve asset, so it is simultaneously the least volatile major crypto and still several times more volatile than equities — macro liquidity moves it more than crypto-specific news
The practical consequence is not to react to a move until you know which of the three caused it. A 10% fall during a market-wide flush means something entirely different from a 10% fall while everything else is flat. The first is usually noise; the second is usually information.
The honest case against BTC
Every asset has one, and refusing to look at it is the most expensive habit in this market. For Bitcoin, the structural risk is this: it does almost nothing except be scarce and settle payments — the entire investment case rests on continued adoption of that single property, and it competes for the same "store of value" role as gold, which has a several-thousand-year head start.
Notice what that is not. It is not "the price might fall" — every price might. It is a specific mechanism by which the reason for owning the asset stops being true, and that distinction is what separates a drawdown you should sit through from an impairment you should exit.
Bitcoin also competes with gold, sovereign bonds and, at the margin, other large-cap crypto. If capital flows there instead, it can be a perfectly good project and still a poor investment.
What to watch
Most of what gets published about any crypto asset is noise dressed as analysis. For Bitcoin, the short list is: spot ETF net flows, the share of supply that has not moved in over a year, hashrate trend, and the real interest-rate environment.
Check them on a schedule rather than continuously. Monthly is enough for most holders. Continuous monitoring does not produce better decisions — it produces more decisions, and in a market this volatile more decisions is reliably worse.
Setting a BTC price alert
The most common mistake is setting the threshold too close. If it sits inside BTC's normal daily range it will fire constantly, you will start dismissing without reading, and the alert that mattered gets dismissed with the rest.
Work from the range instead. BTC has moved between $79,548 and $80,449 recently, so alerts placed at or beyond those edges mark genuine changes of state rather than ordinary movement.
One last filter: does the level mean something to you specifically — a price you would add at, or one that breaks your reason for holding BTC? If it is just a level other people talk about, it will fire and you will do nothing.
Get told when BTC moves
Set a price or percentage alert once. It runs on our servers, so it fires even with the app closed — and quiet hours mean it will not wake you at 4am.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the price of Bitcoin today?
Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $79,648, down 0.95% over the last 24 hours. Its recent range is $79,548 to $80,449. Prices update continuously on this page.
What is Bitcoin used for?
Bitcoin is a fixed-supply, politically neutral money that no company or government issues or can inflate. It works through proof-of-work mining, where energy expenditure secures the ledger and issuance halves roughly every four years until it stops entirely.
What are the risks of holding BTC?
The structural risk is that it does almost nothing except be scarce and settle payments — the entire investment case rests on continued adoption of that single property, and it competes for the same "store of value" role as gold, which has a several-thousand-year head start. It also competes with gold, sovereign bonds and, at the margin, other large-cap crypto, so capital flowing elsewhere can hurt the price even if nothing about the project changes. Nothing on this page is financial advice.
How do I get an alert when BTC hits a price?
Create a free CoinPriceAlert account and set a price or percentage alert on BTC. Alerts are evaluated on our servers, so they arrive as a push notification even when the app is closed — and quiet hours stop a 24/7 market waking you at 4am.
Profile written by Gurjeet Singh, CoinPriceAlert's developer. Market data: CoinGecko, refreshed continuously; alert planner: 365 daily closes from Binance. Nothing here is financial advice.