Credits & inspiration

This course stands on the shoulders of brilliant educators, writers and builders. The interactive demos in particular were inspired by the open-source visualisations below — go explore the originals, they’re superb.

Interactive demos

The hands-on demos here (hashing, keys, signatures, mining, transactions, the blockchain and peer-to-peer consensus) were inspired by these two open resources.

Anders Brownworth — Blockchain 101 demos — andersbrownworth.com
The classic visual walkthrough — hash, block, blockchain, distributed consensus, public/private keys — that shaped this course’s Hashing, Mining, Blockchain and Peer-to-peer consensus demos.
The Royal Fork — graphical Bitcoin internals — royalforkblog.github.io
Beautiful step-by-step visual breakdowns of a raw transaction and of address / key generation — the inspiration for this course’s Anatomy of a transaction and Private → public keys demos.

Talks & videos worth watching

Some of the clearest explanations of these ideas are on video — several directly shaped lessons here.

James D’Angelo — “Quindecillions & the Amazing Math of Bitcoin’s Private Keys” — Bitcoin 101, CRI
A joyful deep-dive into the sheer size of 2²⁵⁶ and why a private key can’t be guessed — the direct inspiration for our Entropy lesson and its “quindecillions” scale ladder.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos — talks — aantonop
One of Bitcoin’s clearest and most beloved explainers. His 2014 testimony to the Canadian Senate is a superb primer for newcomers, and “Bubble Boy and the Sewer Rat” is a classic on why an open, constantly-attacked system grows stronger than a walled garden.
- Canadian Senate testimony ↗
- Bubble Boy & the Sewer Rat ↗
Erik Voorhees — “The Role of Bitcoin as Money” — Bitcoin 2013 Conference
An early, remarkably clear case for why Bitcoin is money and why that matters for freedom.
Mike Hearn — “Autonomous agents, self-driving cars and Bitcoin” — Turing Festival 2013
A prescient early vision of machines transacting natively on a payment network — behind our “money of the internet” arc (agents and robots that can’t open bank accounts).
Ray Dalio — “How the Economic Machine Works” — Principles by Ray Dalio
The classic 30-minute explainer of credit, debt cycles and central banks — great background for the Monetary History section.
Robert Breedlove — “The World’s Best Speech on Money” — Francisco’s money speech, from Atlas Shrugged
A stirring reading of Ayn Rand’s money speech — on what money really represents, and what happens when it’s corrupted.
Lyn Alden — “Broken Money” — Oslo Freedom Forum
A concise talk version of the book’s thesis: how money became broken, and how technology changes it.
Ben Eater — “Building an 8-bit breadboard computer” — Ben Eater
Builds a working computer from logic chips on breadboards, one wire at a time — the clearest way to truly grasp how computers work from bits up, and a superb companion to the Computer Science section.
Christof Paar — “Introduction to Cryptography” — Ruhr University Bochum lecture series
A full university course on cryptography, published free in its entirety — from classical ciphers through to public-key systems and elliptic curves. Where this course gives you the intuition, these lectures give you the rigour; the natural next step after the Cryptography section.

Ideas, data & further reading

The arguments and history throughout the course draw on these thinkers and sources — all worth your time.

Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss — “Money is broken; long live money”
The “periodic table of money” framing — scoring every form of money against the properties of money — behind our Periodic Table demo.
Lyn Alden — Broken Money
A deep, clear history of money and its technological ledger — a backbone for the Monetary History section.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos — Mastering Bitcoin
The canonical open-source technical reference for how Bitcoin actually works.
Robert Breedlove — writing on money & time
Essays on sound money, time preference and freedom that inform the “why it matters” arc.
Jason Lowery — Softwar
The “power projection” lens on proof-of-work and energy money.
satsvsfiat.com
Live comparisons of everyday prices in sats vs fiat over time.
The Economist — Big Mac Index
The source for the “same burger, more dollars” chart in The invisible tax.
WTF Happened In 1971?
A gallery of charts showing wages, debt, inequality and asset prices all diverging right after the dollar left gold in 1971 — the vivid companion to the Nixon Shock lesson.

Spotted something we should credit, or a link that’s wrong? Corrections are very welcome. Let us know ↗