Bitcoin technology · from idea to mechanism
How Bitcoin works.
What do nodes verify? How does mining difficulty change? What happens when a transaction is signed? Explore the documents, real decisions and technical stories.
17 articles in this collectionThe network
What makes Bitcoin Bitcoin
Bitcoin Without Myths: What Satoshi Actually Proposed
How signatures, a peer network, proof of work and incentives combined to address double spending without a central verifier.
Read articleBasics · UTXOs and keysWhere Bitcoin exists
Why a balance is a sum of unspent outputs and a wallet holds keys rather than coins.
Read articleConsensus · Accumulated work · 9 min readWhy the Longest Chain Is Not Always the Main Chain
How a node selects the valid history with the most accumulated work—and why block count alone cannot decide.
Read articleIssuance · HalvingsWhy the limit is 21 million BTC
An inverted pyramid of issuance, a decreasing geometric series, and the network after the last subsidy.
Read articleComparison · Rules, not rankingsBitcoin, Ethereum, and Stablecoins: Same Screen, Different Promises
Why BTC, ETH, and a reserve-backed stablecoin cannot be honestly compared in one line: their rules, risks, and purposes differ.
Read articleMining
Work, difficulty and energy
Mining: from CPUs to an industry
How CPUs, GPUs and ASICs changed the network—and why mining is not effortless income.
Read articleProtocol · Every 2,016 blocksHow Bitcoin Finds Its Way Back to Ten Minutes
Why mining difficulty changes every 2,016 blocks and why ten minutes is a target, not a timetable.
Read articleMining · 2009–2024From CPUs to ASICs: How Bitcoin's Mining Rules Changed
How home processors gave way to ASICs, the subsidy fell from 50 to 3.125 BTC, and full nodes retained the final say.
Read articleMining pools · 2026 researchThe Miner Slowed Down, but the Pool Kept Expecting the Old Speed
Why a difficulty controller can stop noticing a working miner and why it needs a timer that does not depend on new shares.
Read articleMining · Energy and flexible loadBitcoin Mining and the Grid: A Consumer That Can Switch Off
Why mining uses substantial energy, how it can curtail quickly, and why that does not automatically make it helpful to every grid.
Read articleNodes and rules
How participants verify the network
When Bitcoin Introduced Computers Through IRC
How a temporary centralized helper introduced nodes without gaining authority over the network’s rules or history.
Read articleConsensus · BIP 30 · 2010–2012Two Transactions with One Name: the Rule Bitcoin Did Not Yet Have
How duplicate transaction identifiers exposed a gap in Bitcoin's early rules and led to BIP 30.
Read articleBitDNS · December 2010Why Satoshi Did Not Want to Put the Whole World in One Chain
What the BitDNS discussion revealed about blockchain boundaries, independent rules, and shared mining work.
Read articleOpen source · Reproducible buildsHow to Check That Software Came from the Published Code
Why open source alone is not enough and how reproducible builds reduce reliance on one distributor.
Read articleTransactions and Lightning
From spending conditions to payment channels
P2SH: The Address That Hid Its Spending Conditions
How P2SH moved complexity from sender to receiver, made multisig payments practical, and required careful activation.
Read articleBitcoin Core · Fix merged September 9, 2026When the Order of Two PSBTs Decided Whether a Signature Worked
How combinepsbt lost a requested sighash type and why a valid signature could be rejected solely because of file order.
Read articleEclair · Release 0.14.3 · September 14, 2026When a Lightning Channel Peer Could Make You Overpay
Why Eclair 0.14.3 is a security release and how bugs in channel closing, splicing, and on-the-fly funding could affect a node's balance.
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