Bitcoin (BTC) Exchange

Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency and still the largest by market value. It runs on its own chain, where roughly every ten minutes miners add a block of transactions and receive newly issued coins for the work. That issuance halves about every four years and stops entirely at 21 million coins, which is why Bitcoin is usually described as scarce by design rather than by policy.

Transfers are settled by the network itself: there is no company to ask and no account to open. A payment needs one confirmation to be visible and is normally treated as final after three to six. Fees depend on how busy the chain is and on the size of the transaction in bytes, not on the amount being sent, so moving a large sum costs the same as a small one.

In practice Bitcoin is held rather than spent. It is the deepest market in crypto, the pair every exchange quotes, and the asset most other coins are priced against. That depth is the reason it is the usual destination when someone closes a position in a smaller token, and the usual source when someone wants to buy one.

What it does not do well is small everyday payments: blocks are limited, so during busy periods fees rise and confirmation takes longer. For day-to-day transfers people move to stablecoins on faster networks and keep Bitcoin for storage.

Practical points for a swap. A Bitcoin address comes in three shapes: legacy addresses starting with 1, script addresses with 3, and native SegWit starting with bc1. All three receive fine, but bc1 costs less to spend later, which matters if the amount is small. Confirmation time is not fixed: it depends on the fee attached to the transaction and on how full the mempool is, so the same transfer can settle in ten minutes or sit for an hour.

The Lightning network is a separate destination, not a faster version of the same address. Funds sent to a Lightning invoice do not arrive at an on-chain address and the reverse is also true, so check which one the receiving side expects before you send anything.