Bitcoin 101

The free course that comes with The Boy Who Cried Bitcoin.

You just read the story. Four short modules, no signup, no tracking, no upsell — just what the boy at the kitchen table wishes somebody had explained to him properly.

00 Module 0 — Welcome If you read the book, you know the shape of it already. A kid at a kitchen table on Longwood Avenue, saying the same six words for sixteen years, getting laughed at by everybody except one uncle who didn't understand a word of it and believed him anyway. That part's finished. What you're holding now is the part that comes after the story ends: the actual how. → 01 Module 1 — What Bitcoin Actually Is Start with the number, because everything else in this module hangs off it. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. Not 21 million and change. Not 21 million until a committee decides otherwise. Twenty-one million, full stop, written into the software in 2009 by whoever Satoshi Nakamoto actually was, and enforced by every computer on the network ever since. Nobody can print more of it the way a government can print more dollars. Not a bank, not a president, not the person who wrote the code in the first place. That's not marketing. It's math, and thousands of computers around the planet check that math constantly, for free, because they'd rather do that than trust one institution to behave. → 02 Module 2 — How to Buy You do not need to buy a whole bitcoin. You never did. You can buy ten dollars of it. This one fact stops more people from starting than almost anything else, because the headline price makes it sound like a country club with a cover charge. It isn't. Bitcoin divides down to eight decimal places, so the actual entry point is whatever you can afford, including nothing at all if that's where you are right now. → 03 Module 3 — How to Custody Every other module in this course is useful. This one is the difference between keeping what you bought and handing it to a stranger. Take your time here. → 04 Module 4 — Keep Learning If you take one next step after this course, read the original whitepaper. Nine pages, written by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." It's free, it's short, and it's the actual document, not somebody's explainer video about the document. You'll understand maybe sixty percent of it on a first read. That's normal. I understood about ten percent of it the first time and pulled the string anyway. →

The one rule that matters more than any module

If someone asks for your seed phrase, it is a scam. No exception, ever, full stop. Module 3 covers this in depth — read it twice.