Bitcoin markets are always open and the BTC price is constantly changing. Find out how to track and understand more about Bitcoin price action.
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The article was originally published on Cointelegraph, written by William Suberg
Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is a market that never sleeps, and the BTC price is constantly changing. It doesn’t matter which currency or commodity is used to measure how much a Bitcoin is worth — BTC is always live and the market is always open.
It wasn’t always that way. In the beginning, before around 2010, there were no exchanges or even reliable price information, and BTC/USD traded at tiny prices — at one point even less than a single U.S. cent. Since those days, however, the price of Bitcoin has soared millions of percent.
As of today, one Bitcoin is worth$17,351. It’s also easy to compare different prices across the crypto market — there’s no need to rely on a single source, and the market is always at work finding consensus.
Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million, and its scarcity is one of the largest cryptocurrency’s unique features. BTC newbies and those unfamiliar with crypto often encounter problems understanding how the Bitcoin supply works, however.
There can be a maximum of 21 million “whole” coins, but these can be divided by up to eight decimal places. This is another key feature that makes Bitcoin so versatile — even if BTC/USD traded at $1 million, its smallest unit of account, the satoshi (often called sats), would still be worth just $0.01.
Bitcoin is yet to become widely used for payments, and current BTC prices mean that 1 satoshi has a way to go before trading at a whole cent. For investors, though, the utility is already there — anyone with at least one satoshi’s worth of currency can buy Bitcoin.
Nonetheless, among mainstream consumers, the myth still remains that it is only possible to buy one whole Bitcoin, when in fact, anyone can buy one-hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin.
Want to know how much 1 Bitcoin is worth beyond 100 million sats? Cointelegraph has dedicated price indexes covering BTC, as well as a wide range of altcoins such as Ether and BNB. Updated in real time for a number of major exchanges, the Cointelegraph price indexes are the ideal tool for getting to grips with live crypto price info.
Bitcoin is most commonly quoted in U.S. dollars (USD) on BTC price indexes — but that’s not the whole story. The BTC/USD pair refers to the price of Bitcoin in dollars, and is constantly updated in real time even when traditional markets are closed.
Beyond USD, however, there are other indexes which refer to the dollar price of Bitcoin but use other cryptocurrencies instead. These U.S. dollar “stablecoins” are a key component of the crypto economy.
The most widely used stablecoin is Tether, active on several blockchains but always pegged 1:1 with USD. 1 USDT = 1 USD. Thus, a BTC/USDT ticker displays highly similar pricing information to a BTC/USD ticker, mostly subject to only minute differences. There are other USD stablecoins, too, and tickers such as BTC/USDC and BTC/BUSD can also help to understand the dollar price of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin stablecoin pairs are nonetheless not identical to BTC/USD: Stablecoins have their own issuance rules and peculiarities, which are separate from fiat currencies. Sometimes, their dollar peg can break down, for instance, and this temporarily creates inaccurate pricing information for Bitcoin in dollars.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
