Course overview

What this course covers, the three paths through it, and the ground rules: education, not advice.

The three jobs money does — and why money has always been a ledger rather than a thing.

What really happens in the seconds after you tap a card — what the middlemen do for us, and what they cost.

Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and 2008: what happens when the people keeping the ledger fail.

The double-spend problem, and the decades of brilliant failures that came before Bitcoin.

The email that started it all, six weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed — and what is genuinely known about Satoshi Nakamoto.

Nine pages that changed money, translated sentence by sentence into everyday language.

January 3, 2009: the genesis block, the newspaper headline hidden inside it, and Bitcoin's first days.

How bitcoin got its first price, and the two pizzas that made it real money.

Satoshi steps back, goes quiet, and vanishes — leaving roughly a million bitcoin untouched to this day.

Silk Road to the ETF era on one timeline — and the three things people constantly confuse.

Blockchain in plain words: copies, blocks, and links — and why one cheater's edited copy always loses.

What a hash is, and how one number per page makes the whole chain tamper-evident.

The address you share, the key you guard with your life, and the signature that can't be forged.

Why burning electricity to guess numbers is the strangest — and most effective — security system ever built.

The difficulty adjustment, the halving, and the honest limit of what scarcity can and can't do.

The longest-chain rule, what confirmations really buy you, and what a 51% attack could never do.

Open a block explorer and audit the live Bitcoin network yourself — no permission, no account.

From Bitcoin Magazine writer at 17 to the Ethereum whitepaper at 19 — and the idea of a world computer.

Agreements that enforce themselves — and why public, automatic, and irreversible cut both ways.

Ethereum is the network, ether is the money, gas is the meter — and the two jobs fees actually do.

Roughly $50 million drained by a bug that was working as written — and the fork that split a blockchain in two.

Proof of stake explained — money at risk instead of electricity burned — and what changed overnight in 2022.

Coins vs. tokens, the standard that let anyone mint one in an afternoon, and what the 2017 ICO boom proved.

Lending pools that pay interest with no branches or application forms — and the four risks nobody advertises.

How a pool of coins and one formula replaced the order book — and what slippage costs you.

The three stablecoin families, whom each asks you to trust, and how $40 billion evaporated in a week.

What's actually stored on the blockchain when you buy an NFT — and both sides of the right-click argument.

Internet communities that vote on a shared treasury — including the one that nearly bought the Constitution.

Read, read-write, read-write-own — the promise steel-manned, and the sharpest technical critique against it.

Sort any cryptocurrency into one of six buckets within a minute of meeting it.

Litecoin, XRP, Bitcoin Cash, and Monero — four early bets on crypto's future, and how each turned out.

Why base blockchains are slow on purpose, and how the fast lanes built on top of them work.

Speed, rigor, convenience, plumbing — the single bet each newer chain pushes to an extreme, and its scars.

A parody coin built in an afternoon, a Saturday Night Live appearance, and what the irony actually teaches.

The machinery behind the pumps — sniper bots, paid shills, rug pulls — and why supply concentration decides everything.

Central bank digital currencies — the inclusion promise, the surveillance fear, and the power questions underneath.

Why your wallet is a keyring, not a purse — and the two axes that classify every wallet ever made.

What a seed phrase unlocks, why nobody on Earth can restore a lost one, and how to store yours properly.

Six criteria, no brand endorsements — plus how to compute the real cost of a $100 buy.

A step-by-step first purchase, in an amount you choose — market vs. limit orders, reading the true total cost, and two day-one habits.

Crypto sends are final. The four-step ritual that makes that fact harmless.

Testnets and faucets: do the whole thing once with valueless coins, including the wipe-and-restore drill.

Four properties that attract fraud, three elements present in every scam, and the 24-hour rule.

Five classic scam families, the case that defines each, and the one-line tell that exposes it on sight.

Platform collapses aren't scams — they're custody failures, which is what makes them scarier.

Seven steps, done once, that block the overwhelming majority of ways people lose crypto.

Triage fast, document everything, report properly — and refuse the recovery-service second scam.

How crypto media economics manufacture hype — and how to build an information diet that includes skeptics.

Five structural reasons prices swing this hard — and why a 50% loss needs a 100% gain to undo.

The cheap-coin illusion, what FDV hides, and two honest habits for reading any chart.

The halving-cycle theory stated fairly, then the four strongest arguments against it.

Six practices shared by people who survive multiple cycles — and why dollar-cost averaging is really behavioral.

FOMO, FUD, loss aversion, confirmation bias — each with the specific defense that actually works.

Which actions are typically taxable, what cost basis means, and the records to keep from day one.

Both sides of the energy debate at their strongest — and four questions to ask of any energy claim.

Why a public ledger is a prosecutor's dream — and why total financial transparency has its own dangers.

World regulation as a spectrum from embrace to restrict — and the three local rules that apply to you.

Four documented uses where crypto rails help real people — each with its honest caveat.

Possible futures ranked by evidence rather than hype — tokenization, agent payments, and the quantum question.

The whole course in ten sentences, then seven sections you write yourself — and a date for the first review.