Lesson 2 of 10

What Is Bitcoin?

Not the hype. Not the headlines. The actual thing, and why it matters.

Bitcoin Is a Protocol

Imagine This

You're at a family dinner. Your uncle calls Bitcoin a scam. Your coworker says it's a stock. Your neighbor thinks it's an app you download. A friend says it's "like digital gold." You've heard ten different answers from ten different people, and none of them actually explained what it is.

That confusion exists because people keep comparing Bitcoin to things they already know. But Bitcoin is something genuinely new. To understand it, you have to start from what it actually is.

Bitcoin isn't a company, an app, or a product. It's a protocol, a set of rules that computers follow to communicate with each other. Think of it like the internet. No one owns the internet. There's no CEO of the internet. It's a protocol (called TCP/IP) that any computer can use to communicate with any other computer in the world.

Different companies build tools and websites on the internet. Retailers, email providers, news sites, everything on the internet is built from a base layer of the protocol called TCP/IP. And that protocol is owned by no one; it belongs to no one. Bitcoin works the same way. The Bitcoin protocol defines how transactions are structured, how new coins are created, and how the network reaches agreement. Anyone can build software that follows these rules. No one can change the rules without the network's consent.

Think of it like this: if you tried to run your internet connection on a protocol you created yourself (call it TCP/Frankstack), your computer couldn't talk to the internet. The rest of the world would have to switch to your protocol to communicate with you. No one will. The same is true for Bitcoin. Anyone can change the protocol for themselves, but in doing so, they only change it for themselves. They're no longer speaking the same language as the network, so they're simply removed from participation. That's what makes both TCP/IP and Bitcoin so durable.

Bitcoin ˜ The Internet Protocol

The Internet (TCP/IP Protocol)

No one owns the internet

Anyone can build an app on top of it

Every device follows the same underlying rules to exchange data

Running since the 1980s

≈

Bitcoin Protocol

No one owns Bitcoin

Anyone can build a Bitcoin wallet

Every node follows the same underlying rules to exchange value

Running since January 3, 2009

Key Concept

Bitcoin is a protocol, a set of open rules, not a company or product. No one owns it. No one controls it. Anyone can participate.

Digital Scarcity: A First in History

A Real Story

In March 2021, a digital artist named Beeple sold a JPEG for $69.3 million at Christie's.¹ Headlines screamed about the future of digital art. But here's the thing most people missed: anyone could right-click and save that image. Millions did. Every copy was identical to the "original." The "ownership" was just a token sitting in a database. That's the fundamental problem with everything digital: it's infinitely copyable. If you can copy a $100 bill the way you copy a photo, digital money is impossible without a middleman keeping score. Bitcoin was the first system in history that didn't need one.

The technical name for this is the double-spend problem, and it had stumped cryptographers for decades. David Chaum's DigiCash (1989), e-gold (1996), Nick Szabo's Bit Gold proposal (1998): every serious attempt at digital cash either relied on a central company (which eventually got shut down or corrupted) or never solved double-spending without one.² Bitcoin was the first that worked, and the first that kept working without anyone in charge.

The Double-Spend Problem: Solved

Before Bitcoin

Alice sends $10 to Bob digitally

Alice copies the file and sends $10 to Carol too

Who actually has the money? Only a bank can say.

Requires: Trust a middleman

→

With Bitcoin

Alice sends 0.001 BTC to Bob

Thousands of nodes verify and record it

Alice tries to send the same BTC to Carol, and the network rejects it.

Requires: Math and consensus

Key Concept

Bitcoin is the first digitally scarce asset in human history. The 21 million limit isn't a policy or a promise; it's built into the code and enforced by every node on the network.

Sources: ¹ "Beeple's Opus: EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS." Christie's auction result, March 11, 2021. Sold for $69,346,250 to Vignesh Sundaresan ("MetaKovan"). Christie's, Lot 6325052. · ² David Chaum, "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" (1983); DigiCash founded 1989, bankrupt 1998. Nick Szabo, "Bit Gold" proposal, 1998, publicly described in a December 2005 blog post (never implemented). See Arvind Narayanan et al., Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, Princeton University Press (2016), Ch. 0, "A Short History of Failed Digital Cash Attempts."

Peer-to-Peer: No Middleman Required

A Real Story

Picture a developer in Nigeria named Adeola who needs to pay a contractor in Kenya for design work, $150. A bank wire? 3–5 business days, ~$35 in fees.¹ Western Union? Another ~$20 and the contractor has to find a physical pickup location. Adeola sends bitcoin instead. It arrives in about an hour, the fee is a few cents, and the contractor has it in a wallet on her phone. No bank involved. No business hours. No borders. No permission.

When you send money through a bank, you're not sending money to someone. You're asking the bank to update two numbers in its database: subtract from yours, add to theirs. The bank is the middleman.

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer. You send bitcoin directly to the other person. No bank, no payment processor, no clearinghouse. Like handing someone cash, except it works across the internet, across borders, 24/7, and settles in minutes.

Bank Transfer vs. Bitcoin Transaction

Bank Wire Transfer

Time1–5 business days

Cost$15–$50 in fees

HoursBusiness hours only

BordersRestricted or blocked

RequiresBank account, ID, approval

Can be reversed?Yes, by the bank, even months later

Bitcoin Transaction

Time~10–30 minutes

CostCents to a few dollars

Hours24/7/365

BordersWorks anywhere on Earth

RequiresAn internet connection

Can be reversed?No, settled permanently

For small everyday payments (think buying coffee or tipping a creator) the Lightning Network settles in seconds for fractions of a cent, built on top of Bitcoin's base layer. We cover that in Lesson 1-7.

How a Bitcoin Transaction Flows

You create a transaction using your wallet, specifying the recipient and amount

Your wallet signs it with your private key, proving you own the bitcoin and authorize the transfer

The transaction is broadcast to tens of thousands of computers (nodes) around the world

Nodes verify it, checking you own the bitcoin and haven't already spent it

Miners include it in a block, bundling it with other transactions and securing it

The block is added to the blockchain: (nodes) check the work of the miners and if they didn't cheat, the transaction is added permanently and irreversibly

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, October 31, 2008²

Key Concept

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer money. You send value directly to another person: no bank, no approval, no business hours, no borders. The network verifies it. Math settles it. No one can stop or reverse it.

Sources: ¹ Sub-Saharan Africa intra-regional remittances averaged 8.37% in fees for a $200 transfer (Q4 2023). Bank wire fees for cross-border transfers under $500 typically run $25–$50 including correspondent bank charges. World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide. · ² Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, Abstract, October 31, 2008. bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.

Decentralization: No Single Point of Failure

The Cost of Centralization

On October 4, 2021, Facebook went down. Not just the app, everything. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger. Gone. For about six hours. Roughly 3.5 billion users were affected.¹ Businesses that ran on WhatsApp lost a day of sales. Entire countries where WhatsApp is the phone system went dark. One company. One routing error. One point of failure. Six hours of global chaos.

Now imagine if your money worked that way.

If peer-to-peer means no middleman, decentralization means no single point of control or failure. The Bitcoin network is made up of tens of thousands of computers (nodes) spread across six continents.² No one node is in charge. Every node has a full copy of the ledger and independently validates transactions.

There's no headquarters to raid, no server to shut down, no CEO to arrest. To stop Bitcoin, you'd have to shut down every node on Earth simultaneously, and new nodes can come online at any time, anywhere.

17+

Years since launch (Jan 3, 2009)

99.99%

Network uptime since 2013

Tens of
Thousands

Nodes running worldwide

Uptime Record

The Bitcoin network has been running since January 3, 2009. In its first four years it hit two significant incidents: an overflow bug in August 2010 and a consensus fork in March 2013³, both resolved in hours and patched permanently. In the 13 years since, the network has run with no meaningful interruption. Governments have tried bans. Exchanges have been hacked. Miners have been targeted. The network has kept producing blocks on the same ~10-minute rhythm, 24/7/365. Compare that to Facebook's six-hour outage that disrupted billions of people, or to the traditional banking system, which closes every weekend.

Sources: ¹ Meta engineering postmortem: BGP routing configuration error withdrew Meta's DNS prefixes from the public internet. Outage duration: ~6 hours on October 4, 2021. Meta Engineering, "More details about the October 4 outage". · ² Reachable Bitcoin node counts. Bitnodes currently shows about ~17,000 reachable (listening) nodes. Many more full nodes run behind home routers, firewalls, or on Tor and aren't visible to a public scan, so the real total is meaningfully larger but uncountable by design (Lesson 1-4, Section 4 has the full treatment). Nodes are present on all six inhabited continents (Bitnodes map). · ³ August 15, 2010: CVE-2010-5139 "value overflow incident" (block 74,638), fork resolved within ~5 hours. March 11–12, 2013: v0.7/v0.8 BDB lock limit fork, chain split resolved within ~6 hours. See Bitcoin Wiki, Value overflow incident and BIP-50, March 2013 Chain Fork Post-Mortem.

The Properties That Matter

Imagine This

You're designing money from scratch. You have one shot to build something that can't be corrupted, can't be inflated away, can't be seized, and doesn't require trusting anyone. What would you require? It would have to be scarce, so no one can print more. Portable, so anyone anywhere can use it. Divisible, so you're not carrying around giant coins. Durable, so it doesn't rot, burn, or rust. Verifiable, so you can confirm it's real without asking an expert. And censorship-resistant, so no government or corporation can block a transaction just because they don't like it. Satoshi didn't invent these requirements. Aristotle wrote about most of them two thousand years ago. Bitcoin was just the first design to satisfy all six at once, digitally, and without a trusted third party.¹

What makes Bitcoin work as money? It comes down to six properties, each one a deliberate design choice, not an accident.

Scarce

Only 21 million will ever exist. The supply is fixed in code: no central bank, no vote, no emergency can change it.

Portable

A dollar moves like a billion dollars: across the internet, settled in minutes, with no bank in the middle.

Divisible

Split down to 8 decimal places. 1 sat = 0.00000001 BTC, enough precision to price anything.

Durable

No rust, no rot, no physical form to destroy. As long as any one of tens of thousands of nodes keeps running, every bitcoin still exists.

Verifiable

Every transaction is checkable by anyone with a laptop and the open-source software. No expert, no authority, no trust required.

Censorship-Resistant

With your keys in your own custody, no bank, government, or processor can block your transaction or freeze your funds.²

Key Concept

Every one of these properties was identified as a requirement of money long before Bitcoin existed. Aristotle wrote about durability, divisibility, portability, and verifiability in the fourth century BC. Modern economists added scarcity and censorship-resistance. What changed in 2009 is that all six became achievable in a single digital system, without a central issuer, without a trusted intermediary, without a permission slip.

The next section explains the property most people find hardest to believe: the supply is permanently fixed at 21 million. Not 21 million "for now." Not 21 million "unless there's an emergency." Twenty-one million, period. Here's how that's enforced, and why it matters.

Sources: ¹ Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Ch. 9 (c. 350 BC), on the properties required of a medium of exchange. · ² "With your keys in your own custody": Bitcoin held on a third-party exchange or in an ETF is custodied by that institution and subject to their controls. Self-custody is covered in detail in Lesson 1-6.

The 21 Million Limit

The Contrast

In March 2020, the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet by roughly $3 trillion in four months¹, not earned, not taxed, just created. The Bitcoin network kept running exactly as programmed: 12.5 new bitcoin every 10 minutes, on a schedule set in 2009. Then on May 11, 2020², while the Fed's printers were still running, Bitcoin did something it had been designed to do from day one: it cut its own new supply issuance in half. No emergency meetings. No votes. The block reward just dropped from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC, exactly as the 2009 code said it would, every 210,000 blocks.

New bitcoin is created through mining, and the amount created gets cut in half every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years. This is called the halving, and it's what enforces the 21 million cap.

Bitcoin Supply Over Time

2009–2012

The Beginning: 50 BTC per block

Satoshi mines the first block. Anyone with a regular computer can mine. The network bootstraps from zero.

2012–2016

First Halving: 25 BTC per block

The first programmed supply cut. New bitcoin creation drops by half. No vote, no meeting, just code.

2016–2020

Second Halving: 12.5 BTC per block

Supply tightens again. Bitcoin begins attracting serious institutional attention.

2020–2024

Third Halving: 6.25 BTC per block

Happens during the pandemic while the Fed prints trillions. The contrast is impossible to ignore.

2024–2028

Current Era: 3.125 BTC per block

Over 95% of all bitcoin has already been mined (~20.02M of 21M).³ The remaining few percent will trickle out over the next century.

~2140

Last Bitcoin Mined: 0 BTC per block

21 million cap reached. Miners earn transaction fees only. The schedule was set on day one, and never changed.

Bitcoin Supply: Where We Are Now

~20.02M mined (95.3%)

~4.7% left

0 BTC (2009) 21,000,000 BTC cap (~2140)

50 BTC

2009–2012

Era 1

25 → 12.5

2012–2020

Eras 2–3

6.25 BTC

2020–2024

Era 4

3.125 BTC

2024–2028

Now

"No amount of force, coercion, or persuasion can change that. This is not a policy decision; it is a mathematical certainty."

Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard (2018)⁴

Key Concept

Bitcoin's supply schedule is fixed, transparent, and enforced by code, not by people. No one can inflate it. No committee can print more. The math doesn't care who's president.

Stop and Think

Every previous form of money that humans controlled got inflated. Gold got debased and coins got clipped. Paper got printed. The US dollar has lost roughly 97% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913⁵; a dollar from 1913 buys about three cents' worth of 2026 goods. Every single time, humans were trusted with the controls. Every single time, they printed more. Bitcoin removes the controls entirely. No politicians, no central authority. Just math, running on tens of thousands of computers, with no off switch.

A Just Weight

"A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight."

(Proverbs 11:1, ESV)⁶

A "false balance" was a merchant's scale rigged to cheat customers: heavier on one side, lighter on the other, changed at will. Every fiat currency in history has been a false balance: the ruler got moved when the people in charge needed it to move. A 21-million-coin supply, enforced by math and unchangeable by anyone, is the first money in history that is a just weight by design.

Sources: ¹ Federal Reserve balance sheet ~$4.2T (Feb 2020) → ~$7.2T (June 2020). FRED, Fed Assets: Total Assets (WALCL). · ² Block 630,000, May 11, 2020, 19:23 UTC. Mempool.space, Block 630,000. · ³ Current circulating supply. Clark Moody Dashboard / Blockchain.com, Total Bitcoins (April 2026). · ⁴ Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, Wiley (2018), Ch. 8. · ⁵ BLS CPI Inflation Calculator: $1.00 in 1913 = ~$31.50 in 2026, a loss of ~96.8% of purchasing power. · ⁶ Proverbs 11:1, English Standard Version. Cross-reference: Leviticus 19:35-36, Deuteronomy 25:13-16.

Common Questions

Q: If no one controls Bitcoin, who makes decisions?

Changes require broad consensus among the network: node operators, miners, developers, and users. If a change doesn't have overwhelming agreement, it doesn't happen. Again, think of TCP/Frankstack. That rigidity is the feature, not a bug.

Q: What gives Bitcoin its value?

The same thing that gives anything value: people want it (because of its properties), and there's a limited amount. But Bitcoin has a second engine stacked on top: the network effect. As financial analyst Lyn Alden argues in Broken Money, a monetary network's value grows with the number of people who treat it as money: each new holder makes it slightly more useful for everyone already there, which attracts more holders, which makes it more useful still.¹ Bitcoin's fixed supply means that growing demand can't be answered by growing supply, so the value has to go somewhere. Its properties (scarcity, portability, verifiability, censorship resistance) make it useful as money; the network that honors those properties is what makes it valuable.

Q: Is Bitcoin too expensive to buy?

You don't need a whole bitcoin. It's divisible to 8 decimal places. The smallest unit is a satoshi (sat), 0.00000001 BTC. You can buy $10 worth. Thinking in sats rather than whole bitcoin is one of the first mental shifts.

Q: What's the difference between Bitcoin and bitcoin?

Capital Bitcoin = the network, protocol, and system. Lowercase bitcoin = the currency unit. "I use the Bitcoin network to send you 0.5 bitcoin."

Common Misconceptions

What Bitcoin Is NOT

Ten different people will give you ten different wrong answers. Here are the three most common misconceptions, and why they miss the point.

Not a Company

There's no Bitcoin Inc., no CEO, no stock price. When you buy bitcoin, you're acquiring a bearer asset, like gold, not shares in a business. No one can fire Satoshi and change the direction.

Not "Blockchain Technology"

The blockchain is one component, a data structure. The word has been hijacked by marketing departments selling unrelated products. Bitcoin is valuable because of its entire combination of properties, not just how it stores data.

Not Anonymous

It's pseudonymous. Every transaction is publicly recorded on the blockchain and traceable. True privacy requires deliberate effort; that's covered in Level 3. For now: assume your transactions are visible.

Sources: ¹ Lyn Alden, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better (2023), Ch. 12, on monetary network effects.

The Lesson Behind the Lesson

Everything in this lesson (the protocol, the scarcity, the decentralization, the 21-million cap) is a technical answer to an older and deeper question: who, or what, can you actually trust with the store of your life's work?

It's a question with a long and uncomfortable historical answer. Kings debased the coinage when they needed to fund a war. Empires inflated the money when their tax base couldn't carry their promises. Rome did it (the silver denarius went from ~95% pure in the early empire to near-copper by the end). Byzantium did it. The Weimar Republic did it. Zimbabwe did it. Every fiat currency in human history has eventually been inflated by the people in charge of it, because the people in charge of it always had reason to.

On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcoin block. Embedded inside it, in a technical field called the coinbase, was a single sentence. It looked like a timestamp. It was also a message:

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

Encoded by Satoshi Nakamoto into the Genesis Block, launch day¹

The headline ran on the front page of that morning's Times of London. The British government was preparing its second bank bailout in four months. Satoshi wasn't being subtle. Bitcoin wasn't built in a vacuum; it was built on a day when, once again, the people in charge of the money were using it to rescue themselves from the consequences of their own decisions, and the bill was being sent to citizens who had no say in the matter.

What's new isn't the problem. It's the response. For most of human history, the only answer to untrustworthy money has been political: replace the king, restore the standard, hope the next regime keeps its promises better than the last. Satoshi's answer is structural: build a money where you don't have to trust the people in charge at all.

Bitcoin is what it looks like when "trust us" gets replaced by "verify it yourself," in money.

Sources: ¹ Genesis Block (Block 0), hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f, mined January 3, 2009, 18:15 UTC. The coinbase field contains the ASCII-encoded string referencing that day's Times of London front page. Mempool.space, Genesis Block.

Key Takeaways

Bitcoin is a protocol, an open set of rules, not a company or product. No one owns it, no one runs it, anyone can use it.
It solves the double-spend problem without a trusted third party, creating the first digitally scarce asset in human history.
Transactions are peer-to-peer: directly from sender to receiver, with a network of nodes replacing the bank in the middle.
The network is decentralized across tens of thousands of nodes on six continents, with no single point of failure, no off switch.
Bitcoin satisfies all six properties of sound money (scarce, portable, divisible, durable, verifiable, censorship-resistant) in one digital system, the first money in history to do so.
There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin, enforced by code and math, not by committees or promises.
This is no longer a fringe thesis. BlackRock holds ~782,000 BTC for its clients, and the US has established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

Resource	Description
Bitcoin Whitepaper	Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008. Sections 1–2 are the original explanation of the peer-to-peer cash concept. Read it alongside this lesson, not instead of it.
The Bitcoin Standard	Saifedean Ammous. Chapter 8 ("Digital Money") is the cleanest extended treatment of why Bitcoin's supply is "mathematical certainty."
Broken Money	Lyn Alden. Chapter 12 frames Bitcoin's value through monetary network effects. Best starting point for the reader skeptical of "Bitcoin maximalism."
Inventing Bitcoin	Yan Pritzker. Short and accessible. If the Whitepaper felt dense, read this first.
Milton Friedman on e-cash (1999)	Nobel laureate economist predicts "reliable e-cash" a decade before Bitcoin exists. Short clip from a National Taxpayers Union interview.

Glossary

Terms with a dotted underline are clickable throughout the lesson. This section is a full reference.

Bearer Asset: An asset where possession equals ownership. Whoever holds it, owns it; no registry or third party needed. Physical cash and bitcoin are bearer assets; stocks and bank balances are not.
Block: A bundle of transactions that has been verified and permanently recorded on the blockchain. A new block is added roughly every 10 minutes.
Blockchain: A chain of blocks: the public, permanent ledger that records every Bitcoin transaction ever made. Every node on the network has a full copy.
Clearinghouse: A financial institution that sits between buyers and sellers to facilitate the settlement of transactions. Bitcoin eliminates the need for clearinghouses by using a decentralized network instead.
Consensus: Agreement among network participants about which transactions are valid and in what order they occurred. Bitcoin achieves consensus through proof of work: no voting, no authority, just math.
Decentralization: The distribution of power across many independent participants rather than concentrating it in a single entity. Bitcoin is decentralized: no single company, server, or person controls the network.
Digital Scarcity: The ability to create something digital that cannot be copied or duplicated. Before Bitcoin, this didn't exist. Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap is the first example of true digital scarcity.
Double-Spend Problem: The risk that a digital token could be spent twice, sent to two different people. Banks solve this by keeping a central ledger. Bitcoin solves it with a decentralized network of nodes that collectively verify every transaction.
Halving: An event that occurs every 210,000 blocks (~4 years) where the amount of new bitcoin created per block is cut in half. This gradually reduces the rate of new supply until the 21 million cap is reached around 2140.
Ledger: A record of financial transactions. Banks maintain private ledgers. Bitcoin's ledger (the blockchain) is public, and anyone can verify any transaction.
Lightning Network: A payment layer built on top of Bitcoin that settles small transactions instantly and for fractions of a cent. Transactions on Lightning don't touch the main blockchain until the channel is closed, which is what makes them fast and cheap. Bitcoin's main chain (Layer 1) remains the settlement layer for large transfers and final security; Lightning (Layer 2) handles everyday payments. Covered in detail in Lesson 1-7.
Mining: The process by which new bitcoin is created and transactions are verified. Miners use computing power to solve mathematical puzzles, and the winner gets to add the next block and earn new bitcoin as a reward.
Nodes: Computers running Bitcoin software that validate transactions and maintain a copy of the entire blockchain. Anyone can run a node. The more nodes, the more decentralized and resilient the network.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P): A system where two parties transact directly with each other, without a middleman. Bitcoin is peer-to-peer: you send value directly to another person, verified by the network instead of a bank.
Private Key: A secret number that proves ownership of bitcoin and authorizes transactions. Think of it as the password to your money. Anyone who has your private key controls your bitcoin. Never share it.
Protocol: A set of rules that computers follow to communicate. HTTP is the protocol for web pages. SMTP is the protocol for email. Bitcoin is the protocol for transferring value without a middleman.
Pseudonymous: Using an alternate identity rather than your real name. Bitcoin addresses don't contain your name, but transactions are public. If someone links your identity to an address, they can trace your activity.
Satoshi (sat): The smallest unit of bitcoin: 0.00000001 BTC. Named after Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. You don't need to buy a whole bitcoin; you can own a few thousand sats for a few dollars.
Settlement: The actual, final transfer of value between parties. In traditional banking, settlement can take days. On Bitcoin, settlement happens when a transaction is confirmed in a block, typically within minutes.

Bitcoin Is a Protocol

The Internet (TCP/IP Protocol)

Bitcoin Protocol

Digital Scarcity: A First in History

Before Bitcoin

With Bitcoin

Peer-to-Peer: No Middleman Required

Decentralization: No Single Point of Failure

The Properties That Matter

Scarce

Portable

Divisible

Durable

Verifiable

Censorship-Resistant

The 21 Million Limit

The Beginning: 50 BTC per block

First Halving: 25 BTC per block

Second Halving: 12.5 BTC per block

Third Halving: 6.25 BTC per block

Current Era: 3.125 BTC per block

Last Bitcoin Mined: 0 BTC per block

Common Questions

What Bitcoin Is NOT

Not a Company

Not "Blockchain Technology"

Not Anonymous

The Lesson Behind the Lesson

Key Takeaways

Further Reading

Glossary