Plain Answers About Money and Bitcoin
Short, sourced articles for ordinary people. Each one takes a single question and answers it with the data.
Money and Inflation
Why the dollar buys less every year, and where that started.
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Why Does Everything Cost More?
Prices are not really the thing that changed. The ruler we measure them with did.
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What Happened in 1971?
On a Sunday night in August, the President told Americans their dollar would be worth just as much tomorrow. Here is what he actually changed.
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What Is Fiat Money?
Fiat money is money because an authority says so. The idea is older than the United States, and it has worked well and failed badly, sometimes with the same currency.
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Where Did the 2 Percent Inflation Target Come From?
It sounds like a law of economics. It began as a remark on New Zealand television, and it costs a saver more than the number suggests.
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What Is the Cantillon Effect?
New money never reaches everyone at once. A banker who got rich in history's first great paper-money boom explained who gains, who pays, and why the order matters.
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What Does the Bible Say About Honest Money?
Scripture returns again and again to weights, measures, and debased silver. It treats a dishonest unit of account as a matter of justice.
Bitcoin Basics
What Bitcoin is, who is behind it, and how it is counted.
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Is Bitcoin the Same as Crypto?
They share a word and a technology. They do not share a founder, a supply rule, or a reason to exist.
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Who Runs Bitcoin?
Bitcoin has no head office and no CEO, and its creator stepped away more than fifteen years ago. In 2017 some of the most powerful companies in Bitcoin tried to change its rules and found out who really decides.
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Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto, and Does It Matter?
Bitcoin's creator published a nine-page paper, worked on the project for two years, and then went quiet. The search for a name has produced a court case and a lot of denials, but no answer. Bitcoin hasn't needed one.
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What Is a Satoshi?
One bitcoin divides into 100 million pieces. Knowing that changes how the price sounds, and clears up one of the most common beginner misunderstandings.
The 21 Million Limit
Why there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin, and how new coins slow down.
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Why Is Bitcoin Limited to 21 Million?
The cap is not a promise from a company. It is arithmetic that tens of thousands of computers check every ten minutes.
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What Is the Bitcoin Halving?
Every four years the reward for securing Bitcoin is cut in half, on a schedule set in 2009. Here is what happens that day, and what it does not do.
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Bitcoin vs Gold: Which Is Scarcer?
There is a single measurement that explains why gold was money for five thousand years. By that same measurement, gold now has company.
How Bitcoin Works
What happens when bitcoin moves, and why it cannot be faked or copied.
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What Happens When You Send Bitcoin?
Pressing Send takes a second. What follows, from your wallet building and signing a transaction to thousands of computers checking it and a miner writing it into a block, takes a little longer. Here is the whole journey.
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Why Do Bitcoin Transactions Need Confirmations?
A Bitcoin transaction reaches the network in seconds, yet people are told to wait for six confirmations. What a confirmation is, why one block is not the end, and where the number six really comes from.
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Why Can't You Just Copy a Bitcoin?
Anything digital can be copied for free, which is why digital money spent decades needing a company in the middle. How Bitcoin solved the double-spend problem without one, and the one gap a seller should know about.
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What Is a Hash?
A hash is a short fingerprint of any data: the same input always gives the same one, and changing a single letter changes it completely. How it works, shown with real examples you can check, and why Bitcoin depends on it.
Holding Your Own
What it means to own bitcoin yourself, and how coins are kept or lost.
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What Does It Mean to Hold Your Own Bitcoin Keys?
Bitcoin left on an exchange is a promise from a company. Here is what changes when you hold the keys yourself, and what that responsibility involves.
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What Is a Private Key?
A Bitcoin private key is a number, picked at random from a range so large that no one will ever land on yours by chance. Why that is, what happens when a key is not random, and how your public key and address are worked out from it, one way only.
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Can Bitcoin Be Hacked?
On October 29, 2026, thieves took 18,270 bitcoin from Binance, and Bitcoin itself kept running. What has been broken in Bitcoin's history, what never has, and where coins really get taken.
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What Happens to Lost Bitcoin?
In 2013 a man in Wales threw out a hard drive holding the keys to about 8,000 bitcoin. The coins never went to the landfill. Where lost bitcoin really sits, why no one can bring it back, and how much may be gone.
Hard Questions
The common worries about Bitcoin, answered with the data.
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Is Bitcoin a Ponzi Scheme?
Charles Ponzi's 1920 scheme needed a promoter, a promise, and a secret. Real Ponzi schemes have borrowed Bitcoin's name since. Bitcoin itself has none of the three, though it carries a different and very real risk.
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Does Bitcoin Waste Energy?
Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity, and nobody serious denies it. What the electricity pays for, what sets the size of the bill, and why it isn't spent per payment are where the real argument starts.
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Can the Government Ban Bitcoin?
In 1933 the United States banned private gold, and the ban held for forty years. A ban on bitcoin runs into a different problem, though it can still hurt the people who live under one.
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Is It Too Late to Buy Bitcoin?
People have asked this at one dollar, at a thousand, and at a hundred thousand. Nobody can tell you where the price goes next, but the history of the question, and of the people it hurt, can tell you a lot.
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Is Bitcoin Anonymous?
Every Bitcoin transaction since 2009 is public, yet no name is written in any of them. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and the difference decides what other people can learn about you.