₿ Bitcoin & Money

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Contents

← All sections

Economics

Barter
The Coincidence of Wants
The Properties of Money
The Periodic Table of Money

Monetary History

Barter systems
A history of currencies
Why the world converged to gold
The pitfalls of gold
Debasement & clipping
How gold got centralized
Religion, usury & interest
Gold receipts — the first paper money
Credit, loans & fractional reserve
Gold-backed currency
Fiat currency
The invisible tax
When money dies
The deflation myth
Bank runs
Central banks
World reserve currencies
Bancor: the road not taken
Triffin’s Dilemma
1971 — the Nixon Shock
The petrodollar
Austrian vs Keynesian vs MMT
Gold is too slow for a digital age

Computer Science

Binary, decimal & hex
Bits & bytes
The double-spend problem
The Byzantine Generals Problem
Digital money precursors
Napster
BitTorrent

Cryptography

The cryptographer’s toolkit
Hash functions
Salt
Key stretching
HMAC
Random numbers
Private & public keys
Digital signatures
Encryption & decryption
RSA
Elliptic curves

Bitcoin

The digital revolution
The cypherpunks
Satoshi Nakamoto
The genesis block
Digital gold
Who do you trust?
Proof of Work
Mining
Issuance & the 21 million cap
Energy money
Entropy & the power of large numbers
The blockchain
Anatomy of a transaction
The life of a transaction
What Bitcoin is
Bitcoin vs other assets
But isn’t Bitcoin…?
Bitcoin is not “crypto”
Who controls Bitcoin?
The root, not the symptoms
The money of the internet
Stablecoins & CBDCs
The war on cash
The criminal myth
Transparency for power, privacy for people
The final battle

Bitcoin in Practice

Getting your first bitcoin
Scams & red flags
Seed phrases
Addresses
Wallet types
Multisig
Programmable money
Run your own Bitcoin node
The Lightning Network
Using Lightning
Run a Lightning node (Core Lightning)
Privacy & fungibility
Inheritance & estate planning
Taxes & record-keeping
Digital hygiene & security

Final Exam

The final exam

Final Exam

Fifteen questions across the whole course — test what stuck, and get your score.

1 The final exam Interactive Fifteen questions across the whole course — test what stuck, and get your score.

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