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🤔 What even is Bitcoin?

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🤔 What even is Bitcoin?

Welcome back to Back to Basics Week - where we pause the charts so everyone can vibe on the fundamentals.

Today we're tackling the grandaddy of crypto: Bitcoin.

In plain English:

Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency: decentralized digital money that lets people send value to each other without a middleman.

It was created after the 2008 financial crisis, when trust in the traditional system was... cooked.

That year, someone (or a group) using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

It proposed online money that could be sent directly between people, without needing a bank to approve it.

Then on January 3, 2009, Satoshi mined the very first block of the Bitcoin blockchain - the Genesis Block - and embedded a message:

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

Now... how does Bitcoinwork?

Think of it like a shared spreadsheet that anyone can view, but no one can edit.

Every time someone sends BTC, the network needs to answer two questions:

👉 Is this transaction legit? (Do you actually own that BTC?)

👉 What's the official order of transactions? (So no one spends the same BTC twice.)

Bitcoin solves those using two big pieces: nodes and miners.

👉 Nodes are computers running Bitcoin software. Their job is to check that transactions follow the rules. If a transaction is nonsense, nodes reject it.

👉 Miners are the computers that compete to package valid transactions into the next "block" and add it to the blockchain.

And the way miners compete is called Proof of Work (PoW).

Proof of Work is like a security game: miners race to solve a difficult math puzzle. It's hard to win, and it takes real computing power (and energy). The winner gets to add the next block.

This matters because it makes cheating ridiculously expensive. If someone wanted to rewrite history, they'd need insane amounts of computing power to out-race the entire network.

That's why Bitcoin is considered so hard to mess with.

Now let's talk about the thing everyone quotes like it's scripture:

Bitcoin has a max supply of 21 million.

That scarcity is why people call it digital gold:

👉 It's limited;

👉 It's difficult/expensive to produce (mining);

👉 Nobody can just decide to make more because they feel like it.

And why does Bitcoin matter?

Well, it introduced a new kind of money system with some wild properties:

👉 Decentralization: no central authority to freeze, censor, or control the network;

👉 Trustless payments: you don't need to trust a bank;

👉 Security: backed by cryptography + Proof of Work;

👉 Scarcity: capped supply.

And it proved blockchain could work in the wild - which is why thousands of other crypto projects exist today.

That said, yes, it does have some issues (we're fun, not delusional):

👉 Scalability: Bitcoin's base layer doesn't process a huge number of transactions per second;

👉 Energy use: Proof-of-Work mining uses significant energy (big debate topic);

👉 Regulation: governments still argue about what Bitcoin should be and how to tax it.

Overall, Bitcoin is the first real-world example of money that runs on a decentralized network - secured by math, recorded on a public blockchain, and limited by design.

And it's... beautiful 🥹

Enjoyed today's explainer? Check out our previous editions on trading types, CEXs vs. DEXs, hot vs. cold wallets, how to spot red flags in a cryptocurrency, what dApps are, how a blockchain works, blockchain types, smart contracts, and coins vs. tokens.

Catch you Wednesday for another Crypto 101 edition!

🔥 Season 9 is ABSOLUTELY COOKING

And yes, this is your very casual but extremely serious reminder.

There's a $20,000 BitDegree x Ogvio Airdrop on the line, and all you have to do to get in is hit 10,000 Bits before the Season wraps up on February 8, 2026.

From there, it's simple: the more Bits you earn, the bigger your share of the Airdrop when it drops 🏆

You earn Bits by doing the stuff you already know:

👉 Completing Missions;

👉 Knocking out Bonus Tasks;

👉 And inviting your friends (because progress is better with witnesses).

So the real question is... are you watching the Leaderboard - or climbing it? 😏

(Trust us, it looks way better from the top.) 🚀

🍌 Juicy memes