An independent Bitcoin reference
The long record of Bitcoin, kept in the open
Bitcoin Data Guide is an original research and reference resource for readers who want Bitcoin's price history, issuance schedule and market cycles set out plainly, with the vintage and source of every figure stated on the page. Nothing here is a forecast and nothing here is financial advice. The aim is narrower and more durable: to keep an accurate, well-labelled record that a careful reader can check.
The site is written as continuous prose rather than as a dashboard. Where a calculation would genuinely help — a return on a purchase, a compound growth rate, a steady accumulation plan — the writing points you to a tool that does that work properly, and keeps the reference data here clean.
Where Bitcoin stands today
The figure below is the most recent BTC/USD spot price the site has been able to fetch, together with its change over the past twenty-four hours. It is a live reading, not a settled close, and it is labelled as such. Historical closes, which are what the reference tables are built from, live on the price history page.
$77,417
0.00% over 24 hours
As of 1 November 2026, 00:01 UTCSource: Coinbase ExchangeFetched by the site's canister and cached for a few minutes.
Where to start
The site is organised into five working sections. Each one is a self-contained body of reference material, and each is reachable from here in a single step.
- Price & HistoryPrice HistoryWhat Bitcoin has traded at, and how that record is built.Open section
- Returns & PerformanceReturnsYearly returns, long-horizon compounding and drawdowns.Open section
- Cycles & SupplyHalvingsHalvings, market cycles and the issuance schedule.Open section
- Learn & ReferenceLearnPlain-language explanations and the glossary.Open section
- Research HubResearch HubDatasets, methodology and editorial standards.Open section
Featured long read
Fifteen years of Bitcoin prices, read as one continuous record
Bitcoin's price history is usually told as a sequence of spectacular episodes: the first exchange listings of 2010, the collapse of Mt. Gox, the retail mania of late 2017, the institutional turn of 2020 and 2021, and the long, cold unwinding that followed. Each of those episodes is real, and each is worth understanding on its own terms. But a reader who only ever sees the peaks and the crashes misses the more useful story, which is what the price did in the quiet years in between.
The price history page sets the whole record out in order, from the first quoted fractions of a cent through to the present, and pairs the narrative with the tables it is drawn from. It is written to be read straight through, and to be returned to when a specific year or milestone needs checking.
Read the full price historyLatest updates
Recent additions and revisions across the site. Each entry links to the page it describes.
- Price HistoryThe full daily record from 2010, with the live Coinbase series covering a bounded recent window.
- Yearly ReturnsOpen, high, low and close for every calendar year, with the year-over-year change.
- HalvingsEach block-subsidy reduction, the price around it and what it did to issuance.
- DrawdownsEvery peak-to-trough decline of consequence, and how long recovery took.
- Data Sources & MethodologyWhere each figure originates and how the curated tables were prepared.
Bitcoin at a glance
Four facts that anchor everything else on the site. They are fixed by the protocol rather than by the market, which is why they can be stated without a vintage.
- Genesis block
- 3 January 2009Block 0 mined by Satoshi Nakamoto; the first 50 BTC subsidy issued.
- Halving cadence
- Every 210,000 blocksRoughly four years, as the subsidy halves at each interval.
- Supply cap
- 21,000,000 BTCFixed by the issuance schedule; the final subsidy ends around 2140.
- Current subsidy era
- 3.125 BTC per blockThe fourth era, in effect since the April 2024 halving.