Protocol & Mining
How the protocol produces a price
Most writing about Bitcoin begins with the price and works backwards. This section does the opposite. It starts from the protocol — the fixed schedule that decides how many new coins exist, the block interval that paces their arrival, and the difficulty adjustment that keeps that pace steady as mining power rises and falls — and then follows the chain of consequences outward to the market. Read in that order, the volatility that dominates most coverage stops looking like a mystery and starts looking like the behaviour of a young, thinly traded asset with a supply that is almost perfectly inelastic in the short run.
Every figure on these pages is drawn from the same curated record used across the site, and each table carries its vintage and source. Where a calculation would genuinely help — the return on a purchase, the outcome of a steady accumulation plan — the writing points to a tool that does that work properly rather than embedding a calculator in the reference material.
Supply & Issuance
Where does new bitcoin come from, and when does it stop?
Bitcoin's supply is not administered by anyone; it is the output of a rule written into the protocol and enforced by every node. This strand sets out that rule in full. The block subsidy starts at fifty bitcoin and halves every 210,000 blocks, which is roughly four years, and the sequence of halvings is what produces the twenty-one million cap. The pages here give the schedule epoch by epoch, show what each halving did to the rate at which new supply arrives, and explain why the final subsidy is not expected until around the year 2140. The point throughout is that the schedule is knowable in advance in a way that no previous monetary system has been.
Start with Supply ScheduleTransactions & Market Mechanics
How does a trade actually settle, and what does it cost?
A bitcoin transaction is a signed instruction that spends an output and creates a new one, and the fee attached to it buys space in a block rather than a guarantee of speed. This strand works through the mechanics that sit between a price quote and a settled transfer. It explains what liquidity means for an asset that trades continuously across many venues, why the same bitcoin can carry a slightly different price on each of them, and how reported trading volume differs from the depth a large order would actually meet. It is the strand to read if you want to understand why the quoted price is a range rather than a single number.
Start with LiquidityMining & Market Measures
What do the headline numbers about Bitcoin actually measure?
The figures most often quoted about Bitcoin — its market capitalisation, its share of the wider crypto market, the cost of producing a coin — are all derived measures, and each one carries assumptions that are rarely stated. This strand takes them apart. It shows how market capitalisation is calculated from price and circulating supply, why that product is a rough convention rather than a valuation, and how Bitcoin's share of total crypto capitalisation moves with the rest of the market rather than with Bitcoin alone. The aim is not to dismiss the measures but to make clear what each one can and cannot support.
Start with Market Cap ExplainedEvery page in this section
The strands above are the way in. This is the full contents of the section, grouped by the part of the system each page covers, so you can go straight to the one you need.
Mining & Consensus
The work that orders transactions and makes rewriting history expensive, from the hash puzzle itself to the economics of the machines that solve it.
- Proof of WorkThe hash puzzle, the target and nonce, and why accumulated work secures the chain.
- Difficulty AdjustmentThe 2,016-block retarget, its caps, and the ten-minute target it defends.
- HashrateWhat hashrate measures, why it is estimated, and how it differs from difficulty.
- Mining PoolsPooled hash rate, share accounting, payout schemes and centralisation.
- Miner RevenueThe block subsidy plus fees, and how the mix changes across subsidy epochs.
- Mining EconomicsCapital and energy costs, break-even, hashprice and compressing margins.
Transactions & Script
How a payment is constructed, priced and confirmed: the output model, the spending conditions, the block-space market and the fee-bumping tools that respond to it.
- The UTXO ModelOutputs created, spent whole and replaced, and why no balance is stored.
- Bitcoin ScriptThe stack-based language, its standard types, and what its limits buy.
- How a Transaction WorksInputs, outputs, change, signing and broadcast, end to end.
- Transaction FeesFee rates in sat/vB, wallet estimation, and the demand for block space.
- RBF & CPFPReplace-by-fee and child-pays-for-parent as fee-bumping strategies.
- The MempoolEntry, fee-rate ordering, eviction, and why it is node-local.
- Block Size & WeightThe 1 MB base limit, the 4,000,000 weight-unit rule and the arithmetic.
- SegWit ExplainedWitness separation, the weight rule and what BIP 141 changed.
- Taproot ExplainedSchnorr signatures, key-path and script-path spends, and the privacy gain.
- Confirmations & SettlementWhat a confirmation proves, and why six is a convention, not a rule.
- Node VerificationThe validation path from mempool to block, and consensus rules against policy.
Keys & Custody
Who holds the key, and what that choice changes about risk, recovery and control — from address encodings to seed phrases, multisig and the storage model itself.
- Address TypesP2PKH, P2SH, bech32 and bech32m: prefixes, encodings and trade-offs.
- Self-Custody vs ExchangeWho holds the keys, and the counterparty exposure each arrangement creates.
- Seed Phrases & KeysBIP 39 mnemonics, BIP 32 derivation, and the three levels of key material.
- Multisigm-of-n schemes, common configurations, and what several keys change.
- Hardware vs Software WalletsWhere the key lives, the attack surface each model presents, and when each fits.
Governance & Evolution
The rules are not frozen. This strand follows how Bitcoin's consensus has been changed — the proposal process, the signalling that activates a soft fork, and the disputes that ended in a chain split — and the newer layers built on top of the output model.
- Major Protocol UpgradesThe changes that have altered Bitcoin's rules since launch.
- Soft Forks vs Hard ForksTightening consensus against loosening it, and who must upgrade.
- How BIPs WorkWhat a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal is, and why a number is not a rule.
- Version Bits SignallingHow miners signal readiness for a soft fork, and the thresholds involved.
- Why Development Moves SlowlyThe review and consensus requirements that make protocol change difficult.
- The Block Size DebateThe argument over how much data a block should carry, and how it ended.
- The Bitcoin Cash ForkHow the block size disagreement produced a chain split in 2017.
- OrdinalsHow individual satoshis are numbered, and what inscriptions cost in block space.
- RunesA fungible-token protocol built on the unspent output model.
- StatechainsA proposal for transferring an output without an on-chain transaction.
- Bitcoin-Native ApplicationsWhat it means to build on Bitcoin rather than around it.
The reference pages behind the strands
The strands above explain the ideas. These pages hold the underlying record and the methodology, for when you want to check a figure or follow a source.
Where the protocol meets the record
The supply rule is fixed, but the market's response to it is not. These pages carry the measured record of what happened around each change in issuance.
- HalvingsEvery block-subsidy halving and what it did to issuance.
- CyclesExpansion and contraction phases across Bitcoin's history.
- MilestonesThe events that shaped Bitcoin, in chronological order.
- Cycle ComparisonCompleted cycles set side by side: advance, decline and duration.
- Performance Around HalvingsWhat the price did before and after each block-subsidy halving.
- Supply ScheduleHow the subsidy halves, and how issuance converges on 21 million.