What is Bitcoin? Why is it unique? How does it work? Why should you care?

There are dozens of wallets to choose from when it comes to securing your private keys. Hardware, software, metal, paper, each with their own trade-offs. Remember: if you aren't holding your own private keys, you don't actually own BTC - you only own an IOU!

Holding your own keys ensures you can't lose money due to mistakes made by other people. Running a full node ensures no one can trick you into accepting invalid payments. Running and using your own node gives you the strongest security model available.

Bitcoin didn't appear out of thin air - it is the result of decades of work. Many digital currency projects failed before it succeeded. Understanding how we got here will help you understand where we're going.

It is hard to find trustworthy reporting in the crypto space. Many "news" sites are pay-to-play or have incentives to favor certain projects. My recommended sites feature quality content and don't publish press releases as news.

Bitcoin is an open collaborative project. As such, public discussion of current events and improvement proposals is crucial to its healthy evolution.

There are a plethora of metrics available about different aspects of the network. They can help us track its adoption and use.

Miners maximize their profits by confirming transactions with the highest processing fees. Since the demand for transactions fluctuates it can be hard to know the appropriate fee. A variety of fee estimation services are available to help users navigate the fee market.

The blockchain is a public ledger of every transaction that has ever happened. Explorers provide us with a view of this history, enabling us to follow the flow of money. You can also drill down into specific addresses and transactions.

Visual representations of the data on the blockchain can simplify analysis of trends. Plus, some of them are entertaining to watch!

Mining is an important aspect of Bitcoin's security. Miners timestamp batches of transactions and make it expensive to roll back history. The time, skills, and investment required to mine profitably place it out of reach for most hobbyists. Stay away from cloud mining - it's often a scam, or more expensive than directly buying BTC!

The blockchain is useful for more than simple transfers of BTC between peers. It can also create immutable timestamped records of small amounts of data. This enables other protocols and applications to make use of Bitcoin's security properties.

If you want to understand low level details of the protocol, this documentation will get you up to speed. These resources are useful for developers who want to build robust applications on top of the blockchain.

There are many open source tools available to help developers save time. There's no need to re-invent the wheel!

Managing private keys to "be your own bank" is no small task. It can involve complex processes if you want thorough protection against many threats. There's also a balance against making it so complex that you lose access to your own keys - keep it as simple as possible!

Contrary to popular belief, cryptocurrency is not anonymous. There are many ways you might leak information that can be used to identify your activity on the network. Understanding the risks can help you mitigate them with software and best practices.

Permissionless protocols enable anyone to program their own economic rules. We can now experiment with economic theories at an unprecedented pace.