How the first blockchain issues new coins, stays secure and keeps blocks on schedule — plus the newer ways people use and hold it.
Every 210,000 blocks the number of new bitcoins created per block is cut in half. Here is the rule, the arithmetic behind the cap, and the claims about halvings you should treat with care.
Mining is how new Bitcoin blocks are made and how new coins enter circulation. Here is what a miner actually does, why it takes so much computing work, and how the rewards are paid.
Miners join and leave all the time, yet Bitcoin blocks keep arriving roughly every ten minutes. The reason is a simple feedback rule that every node runs every 2,016 blocks.
Lightning lets two people pay each other many times while touching the Bitcoin blockchain only to open and close a channel. Here is how that works, why it is hard to cheat, and what it asks of you in return.
A spot bitcoin ETF lets you get bitcoin price exposure through an ordinary brokerage account. Here is what happens behind the share price, using one large fund’s own disclosures as the example.
Market cap prices every coin at today’s price. Realized cap prices each coin at the moment it last changed hands on-chain — which turns it into a rough record of what the market collectively paid.
Realized price turns realized cap into a per-coin number you can put on a price chart. It is an average of on-chain purchase prices — useful, but only as good as the assumptions behind it.
MVRV divides what the market says a coin’s supply is worth today by what that supply was worth when it last moved. Above 1, the average coin sits on a paper gain; below 1, on a paper loss.
NVT asks how much the market values a network for each dollar it moves on-chain in a day. It was pitched as crypto’s version of a price-to-earnings ratio — with the same kind of caveats, and a few new ones.
NUPL asks a simple question: if every coin were sold at today’s price, would holders as a group be up or down, and by how much relative to the market’s size?
SOPR looks only at coins that actually moved in a period and compares what they were worth when spent with what they were worth when created. It reads realized results, not paper ones.
This metric counts coins, not dollars. It tells you what share of the supply would show a gain if sold at today’s price — and nothing about how big that gain is.
HODL waves stack Bitcoin’s supply into coloured bands by how long ago each coin last moved. The bands swell and shrink as holders sit still or spend, and the result looks like waves.
Coin Days Destroyed multiplies each spent coin by how long it had been sitting still. A small transfer of very old coins can outweigh a flood of fresh ones — which is exactly the point.
Blocks, transactions, keys and fees: the moving parts every other topic builds on.
Accounts, gas, staking, the fee burn and layer-2 rollups.
Stablecoins, exchanges without order books, liquidity pools and on-chain lending.
How analysts turn public ledger data into cost-basis, holder and flow signals — and where that breaks.
Spot versus derivatives, funding rates, open interest, liquidations and order books.
Risk, volatility, diversification, position sizing and market cycles for crypto beginners.
Custody choices, seed phrases, hardware wallets and the scams that target new users.
Bitcoin runs on rules that every node checks for itself: how many new coins each block may create, how hard it must be to find a valid block, and how that difficulty is reset as miners come and go. This section explains those rules in plain English and works through the arithmetic in code, so you can see where commonly repeated figures come from and which claims go further than the rules do. It then moves beyond the base chain to two things beginners meet often: payment channels on the Lightning Network and spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
If blocks and transactions are still new to you, read Blockchain Basics first. Then follow this path:
Mining leads straight to two metric profiles: hash rate, which estimates how much work is securing the chain, and the Puell Multiple, which compares miner income with its own recent history. The halving and satoshi glossary entries are short refreshers, and the satoshi converter turns bitcoin amounts into sats and back. Many of the indicators in our metrics library were first built for Bitcoin, so On-Chain Analysis is a natural next section.
The halving is a rule about how many new coins are created, not a rule about price. Price depends on many things the protocol does not control. The halving guide and the market cycles guide explain why claims linking halvings to price deserve care.
No. You own shares in a fund that holds bitcoin, bought through an ordinary brokerage account. You get exposure to the price but not the coins or their keys, and the fund charges fees. The ETF guide walks through what happens behind the share price.