The Bitcoin Signal
Every number the network publishes about itself, in one place — with a plain statement of what each one means and what it does not tell you. No paid feeds, no proprietary indicators, no placeholders. Last refreshed just now.
Price
Binance BTC/USDT · just now- What it means
- What one bitcoin trades for right now on a major spot venue.
- What it does not tell you
- It says nothing about what bitcoin is worth, or where the price goes next. Price is the most-watched and least-informative number on this board.
The full board
- What it means
- What you would need to bid, per virtual byte, for a reasonably prompt confirmation.
- What it does not tell you
- It is an estimate from current mempool conditions, not a guarantee. A sudden burst of demand can strand a transaction that looked well-priced a minute ago.
- What it means
- How many unconfirmed transactions are queued, and roughly how many blocks it would take to clear them.
- What it does not tell you
- A large mempool is congestion, not distress — and not a price signal. It also is not one global queue: every node keeps its own view.
- What it means
- The estimated computing power currently securing the chain, and the difficulty target it is working against.
- What it does not tell you
- Hashrate is inferred from how fast blocks arrive, so short-run readings are noisy. It is a security measure, not a demand or price indicator.
- What it means
- How many blocks remain until the block subsidy drops from 3.125 to 1.5625 BTC.
- What it does not tell you
- The block count is exact; the date is not. It assumes blocks keep arriving at the current pace, which they will not do precisely.
- What it means
- How much bitcoin has been mined, straight from the chain, against the fixed cap.
- What it does not tell you
- Issued is not the same as available. An unknown share — provably lost keys, dormant early coins — will never move again, and nobody can size it precisely.
- What it means
- Unique addresses that appeared in a transaction on the most recent full day.
- What it does not tell you
- Addresses are not people. One user can generate hundreds; an exchange can serve millions from a handful. Treat this as a coarse activity trend, never a user count.
- What it means
- Confirmed on-chain transactions in the most recent full day.
- What it does not tell you
- It misses everything settled off-chain — Lightning payments, internal exchange transfers — so it undercounts real economic use by an unknown margin.
Fees, by confirmation target
Open the estimator →| Target | Typical wait | Rate | Cost (141 vB) | In USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Next block | ~10 min | 2 sat/vB | 282 sats | $0.18 |
| High priority | ~30 min | 1 sat/vB | 141 sats | $0.09 |
| Medium priority | ~1 hour | 1 sat/vB | 141 sats | $0.09 |
| Economy | hours | 1 sat/vB | 141 sats | $0.09 |
| Minimum relay | may not confirm | 1 sat/vB | 141 sats | $0.09 |
Costs assume a one-input, two-output native SegWit spend of about 141 virtual bytes. Your transaction may be larger or smaller; miners prioritise by rate, not by total fee.
Network
716 blocks remaining (64.5% through the period), estimated change +0.99%, in roughly 4d 22h.
Difficulty retargets every 2,016 blocks so that blocks keep arriving near the ten-minute target. The estimate assumes the current block pace holds for the rest of the period, which it will not do precisely.
Source: mempool.spaceBlock 960,917 · reward era 5 · subsidy 3.125 BTC per block. Next halving at block 1,050,000.
The block count to the next halving is exact. The date is an estimate derived from the recent average block interval of about 9.9 minutes.
Full countdown →On-chain trends, 30 days
On-chain coverage →Latest 453,096 against a 30-day average of 469,415. Addresses are not users: one person can generate many, and a custodian can serve millions from a few.
Latest 676,603 against a 30-day average of 664,437. This undercounts economic activity: Lightning payments and batched exchange withdrawals do not appear separately.
Several popular indicators — realised cap, HODL-wave derivatives, supply-in-profit bands, exchange net flows — depend on entity-clustering heuristics: guesses about which addresses share an owner. Those guesses are often good, and they differ between providers, and they are rarely published in full.
We discuss those metrics in our analysis, where the assumptions can be stated alongside the number. We do not put them on a live board, because a figure we cannot defend to the decimal place has no business being displayed as though we could. Where a source is briefly unavailable, the metric shows its last known-good value with a timestamp, or is omitted — never a placeholder.
Keep exploring
The Bitcoin Signal
Price, fees, hashrate, halving and on-chain fundamentals — each with what it can and cannot tell you.
ReferenceBitcoin glossary
Every term this site uses, defined plainly, with no jargon and nothing to sell.
AnalysisThe First-Principles Take
Claim, evidence, reasoning — and an explicit account of what the evidence does not prove.