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Bitcoin basics

What Bitcoin is, why it exists and the big ideas behind it, explained without jargon.

Bitcoin is digital money with no bank in charge. Learn how it works, who keeps the record, and why people use it, in plain English with diagrams.

How a Bitcoin payment goes from your wallet to the blockchain: signing, checking, waiting in the mempool, mining and confirmation, step by step.

Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym that has never been linked to a proven identity. Here is what is actually known.

A section-by-section, plain-English guide to the 9-page paper that started Bitcoin: transactions, timestamps, proof of work, incentives and privacy.

1 bitcoin = 100,000,000 satoshis. Learn the units BTC, mBTC, bits and sats, convert between them exactly, and see why software counts in sats.

New bitcoin is issued on a fixed schedule that halves every 210,000 blocks. See the maths behind the 21 million cap and who enforces it.

Decentralized means no person, company or government runs Bitcoin. See how power is split between nodes, miners, developers and users.

Digital money is easy to copy. Learn how Bitcoin stops anyone spending the same coins twice, without a bank, using UTXOs, blocks and proof of work.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Every payment is public forever, and names stay hidden only until something links them to you. Learn how.

A bank balance is a promise from your bank; self-custodied bitcoin is controlled directly by your keys. Compare freezing, supply, fees and reversals.

Every new bitcoin is created by miners in the first transaction of each block, on a fixed schedule every node checks. See how much and how often.