$BTC Bitcoin’s price is renowned for being highly volatile, but despite that, it has become the top performing asset of any class (including stocks, commodities and bonds) over the past decade – climbing a staggering 9,000,000% between 2010 and 2020.

When the cryptocurrency was launched at the beginning of 2009, as Satoshi Nakamoto mined the bitcoin genesis block (the first-ever block on the Bitcoin blockchain), 50 BTC entered circulation at a price of $0.00.

Fifty bitcoin continued to enter circulation every block (created once every 10 minutes) until the first halving event took place in November 2012 (see below). Halvings refer to bitcoin’s issuance system, which was programmed into Bitcoin’s code by Satoshi Nakamoto. It essentially involves automatically halving the number of new BTC entering circulation every 210,000 blocks.