

How Bitcoin Actually Works: A First Principles Guide
From entropy and SHA-256 to proof of work and the 21 million cap: a first principles guide to how Bitcoin works, and what you can verify yourself.
If you could use tulips to instantly transmit value across the globe to anyone in any country, regardless of whether they had a functioning government or banking system.
If the government couldn’t come to your door and take away your tulips or control who you could sell them to or in what ways.
If tulips could last for hundreds of years or millennia and be handed down to your children, redeemed for other forms of value.
If you could hide tulips in your brain and walk out of a failing nation holding all your wealth in your head without anyone being the wiser.
If you could program tulips to require authorization from multiple parties before they could be passed on in a completely unbreakable way.
If it was impossible to grow inferior malnourished tulips by skimping on nutrients and selling them like the real deal.
If each tulip carried inscribed on its petals its entire unforgeable history of ownership.
If someone couldn’t invent a superior way to produce tulips and flood the market to crash the price.
Then yes, Bitcoin is just like Dutch tulip bubble.
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Yan Pritzker is the cofounder and CTO of Swan Bitcoin and the author of Inventing Bitcoin.
Thoughts on Bitcoin from the Swan team and friends.
From entropy and SHA-256 to proof of work and the 21 million cap: a first principles guide to how Bitcoin works, and what you can verify yourself.
A history of every Bitcoin hard fork, from Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold to the 2026 BIP-110 split, and why each new coin collapsed against Bitcoin.
Managing a substantial Bitcoin position across custody, trusts, retirement accounts, inheritance, and decades of family change is hard. Here is what a serious Bitcoin concierge relationship should solve.




