bitcoin
There is a structural tension at the heart of Bitcoin's relationship with government, and no amount of lobbying, litigation, or legislation will resolve it. Bitcoin is a permissionless protocol. The state is a permissioning institution. These two things will coexist, sometimes productively and somet
bitcoin
There is no CEO of Bitcoin. There is no board of directors, no shareholder vote, no annual meeting where strategy gets set over catered lunch. This is not a bug in the system. It is the system. And understanding how Bitcoin actually changes — who proposes, who signals, who enforces, who demands — is
bitcoin
Every conversation about Bitcoin eventually collapses into the same question: "What's it trading at?" And with that question, the entire framework shifts. Bitcoin becomes a ticker symbol, a line on a chart, something you buy low and sell high — or, more commonly, buy high and sell in a panic. The pr
bitcoin
The energy argument against Bitcoin goes something like this: Bitcoin mining consumes as much electricity as a mid-sized country, and this is wasteful because we could just use a database. The argument is simple, intuitive, and wrong in the ways that matter. Not wrong about the energy consumption —
bitcoin
There is a persistent myth that Bitcoin is anonymous. It appears in news coverage, in congressional testimony, in the vague anxieties of regulators who warn about cryptocurrency enabling untraceable criminal finance. The myth is wrong, and the reality is almost exactly the opposite: Bitcoin is one o
bitcoin
If you have spent any time talking about Bitcoin with skeptical, intelligent people — the kind of people whose opinions are worth taking seriously — you have encountered a set of recurring objections. Bitcoin wastes energy. It is too volatile to be money. Criminals use it. It is a tulip mania. Gover
bitcoin
Every monetary system has a policy — a set of rules governing how new units of currency enter circulation, how many will ultimately exist, and who decides. In most systems we live under, those rules are set by people: central bankers, treasury officials, elected and unelected committees meeting behi
bitcoin
Most people who own bitcoin could not explain how a transaction works. This is not an insult — most people who use email could not explain SMTP either. But Bitcoin is different from email in one critical respect: it asks you to be your own bank. And if you are going to be your own bank, you should u
bitcoin
Bitcoin has a throughput problem, and the people who built it knew this from the start. The base layer processes roughly seven transactions per second. Visa handles thousands. If Bitcoin is going to function as a medium of exchange — not just a store of value you buy and hold — it needs a way to mov
bitcoin
There is a distinction in Bitcoin that most people never think about: the difference between using the network and being part of it. When you send a transaction from an exchange or a mobile wallet, you are trusting someone else's infrastructure. Their node validates your transaction. Their copy of t
bitcoin
We have spent three articles building a foundation. Bitcoin is infrastructure, not an investment. The protocol works through transactions, blocks, and proof-of-work. The monetary policy is algorithmic, transparent, and immutable. All of that matters. But none of it helps you if someone else holds yo
bitcoin
We have spent the previous articles in this series covering how Bitcoin changes, how it interacts with the state, and how to think about the strongest objections to it. All of that is necessary background. But background without action is just theory, and theory without practice is entertainment.