Bitcoin, unpacked.
Seventeen years ago a stranger gave away the design for a new kind of money and then vanished. Today it sits in pension funds, government vaults and phone apps on every continent. This is the whole story: how it works, who built it, who owns it, what could go wrong, and why people will not stop arguing about it.
The network at this moment
Read live from public APIs in your browser. Nothing on this page is a stored price.
Seven-day price shape appears here when live data loads.
Bitcoin in 60 seconds
Six ideas, ten seconds each. Everything else on this site is detail.
No company, bank or government creates it or runs it. The rules live in open-source software that anyone can read and run.
Thousands of computers each hold a full copy of every transaction ever made and check each new one for themselves.
About every ten minutes one miner wins a costly guessing game and adds a block of transactions. The cost is what makes history hard to rewrite.
New coins arrive on a schedule that halves every four years and ends just short of 21 million. Nobody can print more.
Coins are controlled by secret numbers called private keys. Hold the key and no one can stop you spending. Lose it and no one can help.
Some see digital gold. Some see a bubble with good branding. The market reruns the debate every second, which is why it swings so hard.
Sixteen ways in
Each section stands alone. Read in order for the full course, or go straight to what you came for.
What is Bitcoin
Money with no issuer, a ledger with no owner, and a supply schedule that nobody can vote to change. Here is the whole idea, in plain English.
02How it works
Mine a block in your browser, take the first transaction apart, and see why rewriting history costs more than anyone can afford.
03History
Thirty years of failed digital cash, one nine-page paper, and everything that has happened since. Filter the timeline by era.
04People
Bitcoin has no chief executive, but it has a cast. Search and filter more than 120 cypherpunks, coders, investors, politicians, teachers and sceptics.
05ETFs
It took ten years, more than a dozen rejections and a lawsuit. Then bitcoin arrived in ordinary brokerage accounts, and became the fastest-growing fund launch on record.
06Holders
Every coin is visible on a public ledger, yet ownership is still a puzzle. Here is the best dated, sourced picture of where the 21 million sit.
07Mining
A global race to turn electricity into security. Who mines, where, with what, how much power it takes, and why some miners are now renting their sites to AI.
08Lightning and layers
The base chain is slow on purpose. Speed is built on top. Open a payment channel, send sats back and forth, and tour everything else being built above bitcoin.
09Buy and store
Three ways to own it, a dozen ways to lose it. A neutral, practical guide to exchanges, wallets, seed phrases and the scams that catch smart people.
10Economics
A supply curve fixed in 2009 and a price set fresh every second. Explore the halving schedule, the digital-gold argument, and the best case against it.
11Risks and criticisms
A guide that only told you the good parts would not be worth reading. These are the serious objections, stated as their best advocates would state them.
12Culture
Two pizzas, one typo, a hard drive in a landfill and a headline frozen in block zero. The folklore of the internet’s strangest money.
13Glossary
Every piece of jargon on this site, and a few you will meet elsewhere, defined in a sentence or two.
14Quiz
Twenty questions, three levels, an explanation after every answer. No sign-up, no leaderboard, nothing stored.
15FAQ
Short, direct answers. Each one links to the page that explains it properly.
16Sources
Where the facts on this site come from, how figures are dated, and what we chose not to claim.
Things to try
Bitcoin is easier to understand by poking at it than by reading about it.
Mine a block
Your browser runs real SHA-256 until it finds a winning hash. Turn the difficulty up and feel why miners need warehouses.
InteractiveSlide through 131 years of supply
Drag from 2009 to 2140 and watch the reward shrink from 50 coins to a single satoshi.
InteractiveOpen the first transaction
Take apart the genesis block and Satoshi’s payment to Hal Finney, field by field.
InteractiveRun a Lightning channel
Open a channel between Alice and Bob, send sats both ways, and count how little reaches the blockchain.
CalculatorCompare ETF fees
Enter an amount and a number of years and see what each fund’s fee actually costs.
Live dataWhat if you had stacked?
An illustration, from real historical prices, of buying a little at a time over the past year. Not a forecast.
Flip cardsMyths versus facts
“It is anonymous.” “It can be shut down.” “It has no use.” Flip each claim to see what holds up.
Directory122 people
Cypherpunks, coders, investors such as Micky Malka and Michael Saylor, politicians and critics. Searchable.
QuizTwenty questions
Three levels, instant answers, and a rank somewhere between pre-coiner and cypherpunk.
Pick your path
Three reading orders for three kinds of visitor.
The beginner
About 30 minutes. No background needed.
- What is bitcoin?
- How it works, at least as far as the mining demo
- Buying and storing, especially the scams
- The FAQ
- The quiz, beginner level
The investor
The money questions, with the case against included.
- Economics: supply, halvings, gold
- ETFs: every fund, every fee
- Holders: who already owns it
- Risks and criticisms
- ETF, exchange or your own keys
The curious
Mystery, feuds, fortunes and a landfill.
- History: the timeline
- People: the cast
- Culture: pizza, HODL, lost drives
- Mining: the strangest industry on earth
- Lightning and layers
Where things stand
A dated snapshot. The timeline has the full sequence and the sources page has the references.
A bruising year
Bitcoin set its record of about $126,000 on 6 October 2025, then fell by more than half to a low near $58,000 in June 2026 before recovering part of the loss. It is at least the fifth drawdown of more than half in its history. More on volatility.
Wall Street stayed
US spot ETFs held about 1.29 million BTC on 8 October 2026. Morgan Stanley launched its own fund in April, and one small fund closed in August. The ETF section.
The protocol held still
A contested soft fork to limit data in transactions failed on 8 August 2026 with about 2 percent miner support. Quantum-resistance proposals are now the main technical debate. Current debates.
The 20 millionth coin
Mined around 9 March 2026 at block 940,000. The final million will take until about 2140. The supply schedule.
Washington, unfinished
The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve exists by executive order but not yet in law, and the Senate’s market-structure bill stalled 49 to 50 in September. Governments.
Miners look to AI
With the reward at 3.125 BTC, several large miners are converting sites to AI computing. Hashrate peaked in late 2025 and has hovered just under a zettahash since. The AI pivot.