Chapter · Master Bitcoin
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is digital money that runs on the internet without any bank or company in charge. Instead of a central authority keeping the records, thousands of computers around the world share one public ledger and agree on who owns what. You can send Bitcoin to anyone, anywhere, at any hour, and no single party can block it or quietly print more. That mix of digital, global, and rule-bound is what made it new in 2009.
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What you get asked
What makes Bitcoin different from money in a normal bank account?
Traditional money runs through banks and central authorities. Bitcoin replaces that middleman with a shared network of computers that all follow the same rules, so no single party is in control.
Bitcoin's records are kept on a shared public ___ that thousands of computers hold copies of.
A ledger is just a record of transactions. Bitcoin's ledger is public and copied across the whole network, so no one can secretly change it.
Match each Bitcoin trait to what it means
These four traits are the heart of Bitcoin. Together they describe money that is online, borderless, and bound by rules no single party can bend.
Which statement about Bitcoin is accurate and not hype?
Bitcoin is real digital money with a fixed rulebook, but its price swings a lot and it is pseudonymous, not perfectly anonymous. Honest beats hype.
In what year did the Bitcoin network go live with its first block?
The first Bitcoin block, called the genesis block, was created in January 2009, a few months after the whitepaper appeared in 2008.
The rest of this chapter
Learn what Bitcoin is, how it works, and how ordinary people buy, hold, and secure it safely.