Crypto

Crypto, explained by someone not selling it.

52 lessons, about 5 hours, in order. How the machinery works, what has actually been built, and what went wrong — with dates you can check yourself. No price targets, no forecasts, and no assumption that you have decided anything.

01What problem it solves5 lessons

Digital cash was attempted for twenty years before it worked. Why it was hard is the fastest route to what is actually new.

What a cryptocurrency actually is6 min The double-spend problem5 min The attempts before Bitcoin6 min What the whitepaper actually says6 min What “trustless” really means5 min

02The machinery9 lessons

Blocks, hashes, keys and consensus. Every design decision in every cryptocurrency is an answer to one question, asked here.

What a blockchain is6 min Hashing, without the mathematics5 min Keys, addresses and signatures6 min Proof of work6 min Mining, difficulty and the arms race6 min Proof of stake6 min Consensus and finality5 min Nodes, clients and who enforces the rules5 min Forks, hard and soft5 min

03Bitcoin5 lessons

The supply schedule, how a transaction works, the argument that split the network, and the investment case with its counter-case.

The supply schedule6 min How a Bitcoin transaction works6 min The scaling debate6 min The Lightning Network5 min Bitcoin as an asset7 min

04Ethereum and smart contracts7 lessons

What changes when the ledger can run programs — including everything that can then go wrong.

What Ethereum added6 min Smart contracts6 min Gas and fees5 min The DAO and the fork6 min The Merge and the upgrades since5 min Layer 2 and rollups6 min The blockchain trilemma5 min

05DeFi7 lessons

Exchanges, lending and stablecoins implemented as code. Same functions as a bank, different failure modes.

What DeFi is6 min Automated market makers6 min Impermanent loss6 min Lending and liquidation6 min Stablecoins7 min Oracles5 min MEV6 min

06Holding it safely5 lessons

Custody, seed phrases, exchanges and bridges. This is where almost every real loss has happened.

Wallets and self-custody6 min Seed phrases5 min Exchanges, centralised and decentralised6 min Bridges and cross-chain risk5 min Crypto ETFs and institutional access5 min

07What actually happened5 lessons

The record, with dates you can check: the early years, Mt. Gox, the ICO boom, and the collapses of 2022.

The early history6 min Mt. Gox5 min The ICO boom5 min DeFi summer and NFTs5 min The collapses of 20227 min

08Economics, risk and rules9 lessons

Supply design, valuation, market structure, regulation and fraud — ending with the only lesson that answers the question directly.

Tokenomics6 min Valuing crypto6 min On-chain analysis6 min Crypto market structure6 min Crypto regulation6 min Fraud patterns6 min The energy question5 min Central bank digital currencies5 min So should you own any of this?6 min

How this section is written

Dated facts, not figures

Historical claims carry a date and a place you can verify them — court filings, published specifications, the chain itself. We do not print prices, market sizes or returns, because those change after a page is built and a stale number is worse than none.

Both cases, at equal length

Where the argument is genuinely open — whether any of this is worth what it trades at — the lesson says so and gives both sides the same space, rather than picking one to sound confident.

The failures included

Mt. Gox, the ICO boom, Terra, FTX. An account of this subject that leaves out what happened to people's money is marketing, and the failures are where most of the lessons are.