What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency and still the largest: a fixed-supply digital asset on its own blockchain, secured by proof of work, with no smart contracts to speak of and a deliberately slow pace of change. New coins are issued to miners on a schedule that halves roughly every four years toward a hard cap of twenty-one million. That predictability is the point.

A Bitcoin wallet works differently from an Ethereum one. Instead of a single account balance, Bitcoin tracks unspent outputs, and wallets rotate to a fresh receiving address for each payment. One wallet can therefore span hundreds of addresses derived from one seed, which is why hardware wallets expose an extended public key, an xpub, to let software follow all of them.

Custody choices are starker with Bitcoin because so much of it is held long term. Cold storage on a hardware device, addresses that receive and rarely send, and a seed phrase kept offline are the standard. Exchange balances are convenient for trading and are a claim on the exchange until withdrawn.

Tracking Bitcoin read-only means reading addresses. TrueHold reads Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin and Zcash addresses, shows confirmed and unconfirmed balances, reconstructs balance history, and keeps exact raw amounts so large holdings do not drift through rounding. Addresses, not xpubs, so the extended key stays in the wallet.

Bitcoin exposure increasingly lives outside the Bitcoin chain: wrapped BTC on Ethereum and other networks, spot ETFs in brokerage accounts, and balances on exchanges. A portfolio view has to bring those together as one allocation, which means recognising wrapped versions as bitcoin and counting the exchange balance next to the cold-storage address rather than as a separate line.

Bitcoin also has the longest public record of any crypto asset: every transaction since January 2009 sits on the chain, readable by anyone. That history is what makes a Bitcoin address auditable in a way no bank statement is, and it is why watch-only tracking of cold storage works without the device ever coming online.