TOPIC / 34 RECORDS
Bitcoin
The settlement network, its rules and the practical work of using it. Begin with outputs and confirmations; keep custody products analytically separate.
Build the foundation
- Bitcoin
The Bitcoin paper solved an ordering problem
What the 2008 proposal actually assembled, and what its security argument assumes.
- Bitcoin
A Bitcoin balance is a sum of unspent outputs, not an account
The protocol keeps no account balances, only outputs a wallet sums, which is why change outputs exist.
- Bitcoin
A confirmation count measures work, not final settlement
The developer guide ties confirmation thresholds to reorganisation risk, not to a declaration of finality.
- Bitcoin
Each node's mempool is a private queue, not a shared record
Fee estimates predict recent blocks, so a stuck payment usually reflects pricing, not a broken ledger.
Explore the topic
- Bitcoin / NEW PRACTICAL GUIDE
Triage a stuck Bitcoin transaction before paying to change it
The useful first move is classification: confirmed, conflicted, absent, replaceable or constrained by a dependent transaction.
- Bitcoin / NEW PRACTICAL GUIDE
A Lightning balance can be real and still face the wrong direction
Troubleshoot failed sends and receives by separating outbound liquidity, inbound liquidity, routing and invoice state.
- Bitcoin / NEW PRACTICAL GUIDE
Plan a Bitcoin node sync around verification and future use
Storage mode, indexes, wallet history and software provenance are decisions to make before the first long download.
- Bitcoin
Chaum's blind signature let a bank sign what it could not read
Chaum's 1982 paper hides a note's content from its issuing bank, a privacy trick Bitcoin's design removes the issuer from entirely.
- Bitcoin
A 1993 manifesto wanted anonymous cash years before Bitcoin
Eric Hughes's manifesto set selective disclosure as privacy's goal, a standard a public ledger only partly meets.
- Bitcoin
Hashcash charged computation, not currency, to stop spam
Adam Back's 1997 postage scheme priced a message in computing time, the mechanism Bitcoin's paper reused for a different job.
- Bitcoin
Two pre-Bitcoin proposals left one problem unsolved
b-money and bit gold described most of digital cash's parts but not how strangers agree on one shared history.
- Bitcoin
The genesis block's message is proof, not a spendable coin
The coinbase text dates block zero to January 2009 and the reference client's own code makes its reward permanently unspendable.
- Bitcoin
The 2009 launch announcement made supply a code rule
Satoshi Nakamoto's release post states a 21 million coin cap, a schedule enforced by validation, not by trust in the author.
- Bitcoin
Block 170 shows what a Bitcoin transaction actually spends
The first person-to-person transaction consumed one prior output and created two, one of them ordinary change.
- Bitcoin
Lightning moves payments off-chain, not off Bitcoin's rules
The 2016 paper keeps the blockchain as the final enforcement layer and requires a channel participant to keep watching it.
- Bitcoin
A 2010 bug briefly created 184 billion bitcoin
An integer overflow let one transaction mint value past the 21 million cap until a same-day patch and reorganisation reversed it.
- Bitcoin
The difficulty target moves every 2016 blocks, not continuously
Bitcoin recalculates its target from observed block times every 2016 blocks, not from live hashrate.
- Bitcoin
A Bitcoin balance is a sum of unspent outputs, not an account
The protocol keeps no account balances, only outputs a wallet sums, which is why change outputs exist.
- Bitcoin
A confirmation count measures work, not final settlement
The developer guide ties confirmation thresholds to reorganisation risk, not to a declaration of finality.
- Bitcoin
Each node's mempool is a private queue, not a shared record
Fee estimates predict recent blocks, so a stuck payment usually reflects pricing, not a broken ledger.
- Bitcoin
BIP125 made an unconfirmed payment explicitly replaceable
The 2015 opt-in standard let senders replace pending transactions, unsettling zero-confirmation acceptance.
- Bitcoin
A light client verifies headers, not the rules themselves
BIP37's bloom filters let a lightweight wallet skip most data while trading away some privacy.
- Bitcoin
A bech32 address encodes a script, not an account number
BIP173 fixed Base58's error-detection gaps; BIP350 later fixed a checksum flaw in bech32 itself.
- Bitcoin
The first Bitcoin halving executed a rule, not a decision
Block 210,000 shows the coinbase subsidy fall from 50 to 25 bitcoin on a fixed schedule, without a vote, committee or announcement.
- Bitcoin
Three 2015 block size proposals exposed a missing process
BIP101, BIP102 and BIP103 proposed incompatible block size mechanisms within five weeks, showing no procedure existed to choose between them.
- Bitcoin
Segwit split signatures from transaction ids in 2017
BIP141 and BIP143 moved signatures out of the transaction id and fixed a quadratic verification cost, activating 24 August 2017.
- Bitcoin
Users set a segwit deadline that miners had to answer
BIP148 set a flag day for economic nodes to enforce segwit; BIP91's lower miner threshold arrived first and the two converged.
- Bitcoin
The 2017 Bitcoin Cash split required engineered incompatibility
The UAHF specification split one shared ledger into two rule sets on 1 August 2017 and required a dedicated replay-protection fix.
- Bitcoin
Taproot let cooperating signers look like a single key
BIP340 and BIP341 let Schnorr-based cooperation resemble a single-key spend, activating 14 November 2021 at block 709,632.
- Bitcoin
Ordinals number satoshis by convention, not by consensus
The ord documentation shows inscriptions validated as ordinary transactions, with numbering assigned by an off-chain indexer.
- Bitcoin
A 2024 halving and a token launch shared one block
Block 840,000 carried a scheduled subsidy halving and a coordinated Runes protocol launch, which the record treats as two separate facts.
- Bitcoin
Bitcoin Core's 2025 policy change was not a consensus change
Bitcoin Core 30.0 raised a relay-policy default, not a consensus rule, and Bitcoin Knots shows the alternative-implementation option at work.
- Bitcoin
A draft BIP treats exposed public keys as the risk
BIP360's draft addresses public keys exposed by spending, following NIST's August 2024 approval of post-quantum FIPS standards.
- Bitcoin
A 2024 SEC order approved bitcoin ETFs, not bitcoin itself
The SEC's omnibus order let spot bitcoin ETPs trade while the chair's statement explicitly disclaimed endorsement.
- Bitcoin
A Bitcoin energy estimate is a model, not a meter reading
Cambridge's methodology infers hardware and electricity assumptions from hashrate, which is why it publishes a range, not one number.
- Bitcoin
The Bitcoin paper solved an ordering problem
What the 2008 proposal actually assembled, and what its security argument assumes.
- Bitcoin
The 2013 Bitcoin split exposed a compatibility limit
BIP50 records how valid-looking software versions disagreed and why coordination mattered.
- Bitcoin
A halving changes the mining budget
Bitcoin's declining subsidy makes the fee market a central long-run security question.