White PaperExplainer
What the Bitcoin white paper actually says
Nine pages, published in 2008, that solved one specific problem: how a network with no central authority agrees on which of two conflicting payments happened first.
5 min read
Bitcoin Basics
5
Getting StartedExplainer
Bitcoin 101: How Does Bitcoin Work?
Four parts do all the work: a wallet that signs, nodes that check, miners that order, and a chain that records. What each one does, and what happens to a payment between pressing send and it being final.
6 min read
Getting StartedExplainer
Bitcoin 101: What Bitcoin Actually Is
Bitcoin is a set of rules for issuing and moving money that nobody can change on their own. What those rules are, and how they compare to gold and to government currency.
6 min read
AltcoinsExplainer
Bitcoin 101: What makes Bitcoin different
Thousands of cryptocurrencies exist. The question that separates them is not which has the better features, but which one nobody is in a position to change.
5 min read
Game TheoryFeature
Why Every Family Should Have a Bitcoiner
A household with one person who understands bitcoin is better off than one with none. It is also one funeral away from losing everything, which is why the job is not to be the expert. It is to become unnecessary.
6 min read
Protocol
8
NodesExplainer
Bitcoin 101: Nodes
A node is the part of Bitcoin that checks. It earns nothing, commands nobody, and refuses anything that breaks the rules. What one does, what it costs to run, and why a pruned node is a full node.
5 min read
CryptographyExplainer
Bitcoin 101: Public and private keys
How a pair of keys lets anyone verify that you authorised a payment, without ever learning the secret that produced it. The mechanism behind every Bitcoin transaction.
6 min read
BlockchainExplainer
Bitcoin 101: Blockchain
Each block carries the fingerprint of the one before it. That single arrangement is what makes the record hard to rewrite, and you can watch the mechanism work in one line of terminal.
5 min read
NodesGuide
How to run your own Bitcoin node
Bitcoin Core downloaded, signature-checked, synced and answering for itself. The disk and bandwidth it actually takes, the verification step most guides skip, and how to confirm the thing is validating rather than merely running.
8 min read
UTXO SetDeep Dive
Bitcoin has no balances, only unspent outputs
Bitcoin's consensus state is a set of unspent transaction outputs, not a ledger of accounts. Your balance is arithmetic a wallet performs for you, and change outputs, fees, dust and chain analysis all follow from that one fact.
7 min read
CryptographyDeep Dive
Schnorr signatures, and what Taproot did with them
Schnorr signatures are linear: several public keys add into one key, and several signature shares add into one signature. That single property is what lets a cooperative multisig spend look identical on chain to a single-key spend.
8 min read
Block SpaceDeep Dive
SegWit and what a block weighs
SegWit moved signature data out of the transaction identifier, which fixed malleability, and replaced the one megabyte block size limit with a four million weight unit limit. Here is the accounting, from the BIP, and what it does not do.
8 min read
Fee MarketDeep Dive
The mempool is not a queue: how fees buy block space
Every node keeps its own mempool, miners sort candidates by fee rate rather than by fee, and the rules for relaying a transaction are stricter than the rules that make a block valid. That is most of what decides whether a payment confirms.
8 min read
Lightning
4
PaymentsExplainer
Bitcoin 101: What the Lightning Network is
Lightning is a network of two-party channels. Two people lock coins in one on-chain output and then re-sign the split between them as often as they like. Here is the mechanism, and the four things it does not do.
7 min read
PaymentsExplainer
What a Lightning invoice actually is
A string starting lnbc is a signed, expiring request for one specific payment. What BOLT 11 encodes, why the payment hash is the receipt, and how LNURL, Lightning Addresses and BOLT 12 offers relate to it.
7 min read
PaymentsGuide
How to make your first Lightning payment
From an empty wallet to one payment sent and one payment received, including the custodial decision that changes every later step and the inbound liquidity problem that stops most beginners on the receiving side.
8 min read
ImplementationsDeep Dive
The Lightning implementations, and how they differ
LND, Core Lightning, Eclair and LDK all speak the same wire protocol because the BOLTs say what goes on the wire and nothing about how a node is built. Everything above that line is where they diverge.
7 min read
Nostr
2
RelaysExplainer
What Nostr is, and what it is for
Nostr is a small protocol for publishing signed messages, where your account is a keypair rather than a row in a company's database. What that buys you, and the one consequence to understand before generating a key.
5 min read
AuthenticationGuide
How to log in to a Nostr app on the web
Set up a signer, log in to a Nostr web app without ever pasting your private key, and check that the app is signing with the identity you think it is. Plus the one failure mode Nostr has no fix for.
6 min read
Wallets & Custody
8
WalletsExplainer
Bitcoin 101: How to choose a wallet
A wallet does not hold your bitcoin. It holds the keys that let you move it. Every real decision about choosing one follows from that single fact.
6 min read
OPSECExplainer
Bitcoin 101: Keys, seeds and custody
Keys, seed phrases, hot and cold, passphrases and multisig, defined properly, plus the part most introductions skip: what self-custody costs you.
5 min read
Self-CustodyExplainer
What self-custody actually requires
Holding your own keys removes the exchange from your threat model and puts you in it instead. What that trade involves, what it protects against, and the four ways people lose coins doing it.
5 min read
WalletsGuide
How to set up and use a Bitcoin wallet
For someone who has never held bitcoin: creating a wallet, writing the recovery phrase down and proving it is right, receiving, sending, and restoring on a second device, which is the only step that proves any of the rest worked.
8 min read
InheritanceGuide
Bitcoin inheritance: making sure it survives you
Good custody and good inheritance pull in opposite directions. Every step that makes your coins harder to steal makes them harder for your family to recover. Here is how to resolve that without weakening either.
6 min read
OPSECGuide
Generating a wallet from dice rolls
Roll your own entropy, turn it into a BIP-39 recovery phrase, and check the result twice before it holds any money. The arithmetic, the steps, and the ways this goes wrong.
8 min read
Password ManagementDeep Dive
Deterministic password managers: how they work, and what they cost you
A deterministic password manager derives your passwords from one seed instead of storing them. Here is the mechanism, the cases where it genuinely helps, and the failure modes nobody mentions.
8 min read
MultisigDeep Dive
Multisig: what it fixes, and what it breaks
A 2-of-3 removes the single point of failure in your custody. It also triples the number of things you have to keep track of. Here is how to tell whether that trade is worth it for you.
5 min read
Mining & Energy
2
MiningExplainer
Bitcoin 101: Miners
Mining is not a puzzle anybody solves cleverly. It is a guessing race, deliberately made expensive, and the expense is what stops the ledger from being rewritten. What miners do, what they are paid, and what they cannot do.
5 min read
DifficultyDeep Dive
How Bitcoin holds a ten-minute block interval
Every 2,016 blocks, every node recomputes the mining target from two timestamps and one division. Here is the arithmetic, the clamp that bounds it, the off-by-one nobody can fix, and why a hashrate collapse means waiting.
8 min read
Money & Economics
6
Behavioural EconomicsFeature
The nominal value fallacy, and the version I fell for
Counting your wealth in a currency that is losing value is a known mistake. Counting it in a currency you expect to gain value is the same mistake with a different unit, and it is the one I had to be talked out of.
9 min read
DeflationFeature
Deflation is not the danger. Leverage is.
Falling prices are treated as one phenomenon with one verdict. They are two different mechanisms wearing the same word, and which one you get depends on how much of the economy owes money it cannot service.
8 min read
InflationFeature
The CPI is not lying. It is answering something else.
The usual complaint about the Consumer Price Index is that it hides housing. It does not. The real problem is that a consumption index cannot see asset prices, and almost everybody reads it as though it can.
6 min read
Time PreferenceFeature
Argentina is not impatient. It is dollarised.
Argentines are said to spend everything because inflation punishes saving. The official data says they save enormously, just not in pesos. That changes what the behaviour is evidence of.
6 min read
Time PreferenceFeature
What the time preference maths actually shows
The usual Bitcoin argument about time preference and interest rates has a sign error in it. Work the discounting through properly and it points the other way, which turns out to be the more interesting result.
5 min read
Behavioural EconomicsFeature
Time preference: behaviour, not knowledge, builds wealth
Morgan Housel says wealth comes from behaviour. Saifedean Ammous says the money you save in sets that behaviour. Stacked together they make a claim that is half durable and half unfalsifiable, and it is worth separating them.
5 min read
Merchants & Adoption
4
Merchant MapGuide
How a Bitcoin merchant map gets built from OpenStreetMap
Detection, geographic enrichment, categorisation, naming. The pipeline that turns scattered OpenStreetMap tags into a usable directory, where each stage goes wrong, and how to run the first stage yourself against the open data.
10 min read
Merchant MapGuide
How to find places that accept Bitcoin
Open directories all read the same OpenStreetMap data and none of them is complete. How to search MappingBitcoin, how to read a listing, and how to confirm a place before you make the trip.
7 min read
Merchant MapGuide
How to get a business onto the Bitcoin map
A submission form at MappingBitcoin writes the listing straight into OpenStreetMap. How to add a business that accepts Bitcoin, how to fix one that is wrong, and how to check the change actually landed.
9 min read
MerchantsFeature
Why You Should Accept Bitcoin at Your Beachfront Business
The case for taking bitcoin at a beach kiosk is narrower and better than the usual pitch. It is a cheap payment rail for a specific customer, it only compounds when the shop next door does it too, and since January 2025 nobody anywhere is obliged to take it.
6 min read
Regulation & Policy
3
AdoptionFeature
Texas passes a Bitcoin reserve law: what changes
Texas is the only state that has actually put public money into bitcoin. What it bought was a bitcoin exchange traded fund, which is a claim on a fund that holds the coins. The gap between those two things is the argument.
5 min read
Game TheoryFeature
New Hampshire's Bitcoin Reserve Act, and what it does not do
New Hampshire was the first state to let its treasury hold bitcoin. More than a year later it has bought none. The distance between a permission and an allocation is the whole subject.
5 min read
Game TheoryFeature
The Game Theory of Strategic Bitcoin Reserves
The argument was that once one government held bitcoin, the rest would be forced to follow. The United States has held bitcoin since March 2025. Eighteen months of evidence is now in, and it says the payoff matrix was drawn for the wrong player.
7 min read
