Bitcoin launched in 2009 as a payment network without a central issuer. Miners compete to add blocks by expending electricity, are rewarded in newly issued bitcoin, and that reward halves roughly every four years until issuance ends.
The investment case rests on the fixed supply. No authority can create more, which is a categorical difference from every government currency and the basis of the digital gold framing that now dominates institutional discussion of it.
The behaviour has not matched the framing. Bitcoin has traded as a high-beta risk asset, falling hardest when equities fall and when liquidity tightens, and the arrival of US spot ETFs in 2024 tied it more closely still to conventional market flows.