Back to: Crypto Fundamentals from Zero
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The first decentralized money
In 2009, a pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto shipped Bitcoin: the first system where nobody controls the ledger. It works through three mechanisms you will meet again and again throughout this course:
- Miners (validators) confirm transactions and propose new blocks in exchange for rewards.
- Nodes — anyone running the software — verify every block against the rules, copying the full history.
- Consensus — the network follows the longest valid chain; you cannot rewrite history without redoing the work (proof of work).
Why it matters to you
Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21,000,000 coins, a fixed issuance schedule, and no CEO who can freeze your holdings. That is the property being marketed as “digital gold”: scarcity you can verify instead of scarcity you must trust.
Try this later: In the W3D Lab at the end of this course you will inspect Bitcoin’s live decentralization metrics — miner distribution, node counts and censhsorship resistance — with real current data.