Crypto,Explained Simply
How Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Sui actually work, and how to own them yourself.
About 25 minutes, in five parts. Every section stands on its own, so skip around.
Foundations
- What crypto is, in bank terms
- What happens when you pay
- Why the record can't be edited
How can money exist with no bank keeping the books?
Four networks. Think of them as bank accounts with no bank.
The difference is that no bank runs them. Networks of independent computers around the world do.
Bitcoin = Savings account
Digital gold. Only 21 million will ever exist. You keep it and hold it for years.
Ethereum = Chequing account
Where your money gets used: apps, loans, trading, paying people, all run by code.
Solana = Tap-to-pay card
Built for speed. Fast, cheap payments for everyday things, many times a day.
Sui = Tap-to-pay card
Also built for speed. Treats each coin like its own object, so payments run side by side.
How to read this map: Bitcoin is where you keep value. Ethereum is where you use it. Solana and Sui are where you spend it fast.
The writer could cheat. Every other computer would say no.
Every payment follows roughly the same six steps.
Every blockchain in this guide follows roughly these six steps. The big difference is step 4: who gets to write the next page.
- You signYour wallet signs the payment with your private key. Proves it's you.
- It spreadsThe payment is sent to many computers (nodes) across the network.
- Waiting roomPayments wait in line. Higher fees usually go first.
- A writer is chosenA miner (Bitcoin) or a staker (the others) bundles payments into a block.
- Everyone checksEvery node checks the rules: real signature, no double spending, no extra coins.
- Page addedThe valid block joins every copy of the chain. Your payment is recorded.
Why the writer in step 4 stays honest
Plays fair
Block accepted. Earns new coins plus fees.
Cheats
Block rejected, no reward. Miners waste electricity; Ethereum also cuts the deposit.
No step needs a bank. Step 5 is why nobody has to trust the writer in step 4.
"No bank" doesn't mean "no one in charge"
Nobody can edit the record, but people still write the software, and big holders, miners and stakers influence which upgrades happen. The rules are hard to change, not impossible.
Change one old page and every page after it breaks.
Picture a notebook that records every payment ever made, with identical copies kept by strangers around the world. That shared notebook is a blockchain. Each page is a block, and the pages are linked in order, like a chain.
Each seal is the fingerprint of its page plus the seal before it. That's the link.
The seal is a fingerprint (a hash)
Feed any text into a hash function and out comes a 64-character code. Same text in, same code out, every time. Change one letter and the code is unrecognizable, and nobody can run it backwards. Each block's seal is built from the block before it, so one edit breaks every seal downstream.
Bitcoin
- Mining, and why it keeps Bitcoin safe
- The algorithm, run for real
- The halving, in coins and in dollars
Why can't anyone fake or rewrite Bitcoin?
Anyone can try to cheat. It just costs more than playing fair.
Bitcoin is the safest because cheating costs more than playing fair.
Bitcoin started in 2009 and is the safest crypto network: it has the most computing power guarding it and hasn't stopped once since 2013. People call it digital gold because only 21 million will ever exist. About every 10 minutes, computers called miners race to add the next block.
- CollectA miner grabs waiting payments from the line.
- GuessThe computer tries numbers trillions of times a second.
- WinThe first to find a number that works shows the proof.
- Pay outEveryone checks. Page added. The winner gets new bitcoin plus fees.
The puzzle: find a fingerprint below a target
A miner adds a number to the block, hashes it, and checks whether the fingerprint is below a target value. In practice that means it starts with a long run of zeros. If not, the miner changes the number and tries again. A hash can't be predicted, so the only strategy is trying, trillions of times a second. Checking a winning answer takes one hash, so everyone can verify it instantly. The next part runs this on your phone.
Why that keeps it safe
To rewrite history you'd have to redo all the work for that block and every block after it, faster than the rest of the world combined. The electricity bill would be enormous, and a rejected block earns nothing.
Source: mempool.space and Pickaxe (hashrate, difficulty). All sources
Proof of work: hard to find, instant to check.
Run Bitcoin's puzzle yourself. The block is "Ana pays Ben 2 | nonce N". Your phone counts N up from 0, hashing each one with SHA-256, until the fingerprint starts with enough zeros.
Our own run on an ordinary computer, October 1, 2026. Anyone can repeat it:
| Zeros | Guesses it took | Expected on average | Winning fingerprint |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7 | 16 | 0b7c7e7c8383… |
| 2 | 191 | 256 | 002048b1f382… |
| 3 | 6,293 | 4,096 | 0000381d3659… |
| 4 | 6,293* | 65,536 | 0000381d3659… |
| 5 | 5,507,337 | 1,048,576 | 0000096715a7… |
SWIPE THE TABLE
* Same hit as 3 zeros.
Each extra zero makes the puzzle about 16 times harder, because a fingerprint digit has 16 possible values. Five zeros took 5.5 million tries. Bitcoin's real target is so much harder that the whole world's mining machines, together, need about 10 minutes. Luck matters too: our 3-zero answer happened to have 4 zeros, so it solved both rows at once.
The loop that keeps it at 10 minutes
Henry Ford wanted money measured in energy
On December 4, 1921, the New-York Tribune's front page reported a plan by Henry Ford. He wanted to replace gold-backed money with an "energy currency". One dollar would equal a set amount of energy produced in one hour. He argued it would stop wars by breaking the control of the people who hoard gold. His words: "The essential evil of gold in its relation to war is the fact that it can be controlled. Break the control and you stop war." The New York Times reportedly mocked the idea two days later.
A century on, Bitcoin is the closest thing to that idea: new coins can only be made by spending real energy. Critics say mining wastes energy. Supporters say it turns energy into money.
Why Bitcoin behaves like a living system
It adapts: the loop above keeps blocks at about 10 minutes whatever happens. It has healed from two of its worst bugs: in August 2010 a flaw created about 184 billion fake bitcoin, about 8,800 times the 21 million that will ever exist. A fix came out within 5 hours. In 2018 another bug that could have created extra coins was found and patched within about a day. Nobody is known to have used it. And it's near peak strength: mining difficulty is about 15% below its October 2025 record. Anyone with enough power to attack it earns more by mining honestly, so would-be attackers end up as defenders.
Bitcoin cut miners' pay four times. In dollars, it went up anyway.
The prize halves every four years. Its dollar value kept rising.
The winning miner gets brand-new bitcoin plus fees. Every 210,000 blocks (about four years) that prize is cut in half. This is the halving. It's how the 21 million cap is enforced: new coins stop around 2140.
Sources: Bitcoin Magazine (2009 price), BitPay and Young Platform (halving-day prices), Yahoo Finance (October 1, 2026). USD values are approximate daily prices. All sources
The surprise in the numbers: the prize in coins halved four times, but each coin became worth far more, so a block's prize went from about USD $0.04 to about USD $261,900 today (3.125 BTC at USD $83,805 on October 1, 2026; about CAD $373,000 at that day's exchange rate). That's roughly 450 new bitcoin a day.
Bitcoin isn't a savings account
A savings account pays interest, is insured (CDIC covers eligible bank deposits up to CAD $100,000 per category), and doesn't swing in price. Bitcoin pays no interest and has no insurance, and its price moves a lot: it fell more than 50%, from about USD $126,000 (October 2025) to below USD $60,000 by June 2026. The comparison is about role, money you hold for years. Also, miners' costs rose with their dollar pay, so bigger prizes don't mean bigger profits.
The other networks
- Ethereum: money that follows code
- Solana and Sui: two ways to be fast
What do the other networks do differently, and what do they give up?
Ethereum is money that follows its own code.
Ethereum is the second safest network. It runs programs called smart contracts, which work like a vending machine: money goes in, code checks the rule, and it pays out with no cashier. It's where money gets used.
"Unchangeable rules" has fine print
A contract does exactly what its code says, bugs included, with no judge to reverse it. But many are built to be upgradeable by their owners, and some coins (like USDC) can be frozen by their issuer.
Bitcoin and ether payments can't be reversed. Stablecoins can be frozen: Tether can freeze USDT, destroy it and reissue it. It has returned about USD $87 million sent to wrong addresses, and says it has frozen more than USD $5 billion linked to crime (September 2026). A freeze helps if your coins were stolen, and hurts if the frozen coins are yours.
Ethereum swaps electricity for a deposit you can lose.
Ethereum doesn't mine. It stakes. It switched from mining to staking in 2022, and a new block arrives about every 12 seconds.
Mining (Bitcoin)
You spend electricity to win the right to write the next page.
Staking (Ethereum, Solana, Sui)
You lock up coins as a safety deposit to win the right to write the page.
Staking replaces electricity with a deposit
A validator (a staker running the software) locks up at least 32 ETH. Validators are picked at random to propose blocks; others vote on them. Honest work earns new ETH. Signing two conflicting blocks gets part of the deposit cut ("slashed") and the validator removed. Cheating costs the cheater's own money, not electricity.
Solana and Sui trade some safety for raw speed.
Both are built for lots of small, fast, cheap payments, and both use staking. Solana launched in 2020, Sui in 2023 (built by engineers who used to work at Meta). They get their speed in different ways:
Solana: one scheduler, shared clock
One computer at a time (the leader) puts every payment in order and stamps it with a shared clock. Payments that don't touch the same accounts then run side by side.
Sui: your own coins skip the line
On Sui, every coin is its own object with one owner. Move only your own coins and there's nothing to collide with, so you skip the queue. Shared things, like a trading pool everyone uses, still wait in line.
Speed costs something
Fast chains need fewer, more powerful computers to keep up, so fewer people can run a full copy. Solana has had outages in the past. Bitcoin is slow on purpose: cheap to verify on an ordinary computer.
Final in under a second, not an hour.
Final is the moment nobody can undo your payment. Here's how long each network makes you wait:
Sources: ethereum.org, Anza (Solana), Sui docs; Bitcoin's 6-block convention. All sources
* Bitcoin is never 100% final; after 6 blocks a reversal is so unlikely that it's the usual standard. Ethereum's finality is economic: undoing a finalized block would cost the attacker at least a third of all staked ETH. Solana's Alpenglow upgrade targets about 0.15 s; it's live on test networks, not yet on the main network.
Using it
- Wallets and keys
- Stablecoins and the GENIUS Act
- Bank to your own wallet
How do you actually own crypto yourself, safely?
Lose the paper and the phone, lose the coins. No reset button. That's the point.
Whoever holds the key owns the coins.
A crypto wallet doesn't hold coins. Your coins always live on the blockchain. The wallet holds the key that proves they're yours.
Address
Like your email address.
Private key
Like your password plus signature.
Seed phrase
12 or 24 plain words.
How you prove ownership without revealing the key
Your private key and your public address are a matched pair made with one-way math. The key can produce a signature for one specific payment, and anyone can check that signature against your address. But nobody can work backwards from the address or the signature to the key.
Whoever has the private key or seed phrase owns the coins. There's no "forgot password" and no undo. Write the seed phrase on paper and never type it online. On an exchange, the company holds the key for you: easier, but you're trusting them. Hence "not your keys, not your coins."
A dollar coin is a promise. Make it show the money.
One coin, one dollar in reserve.
A stablecoin is a coin built to always be worth one unit of a regular currency, usually one US dollar. Three you'll meet:
USDT
Tether
The biggest. Mostly on Tron and Ethereum. Issued offshore.
USDC
Circle
Second biggest. On Ethereum, Solana and more. US issuer.
C$ CADC
Loon (sold by Paytrie)
Tracks the Canadian dollar. Ethereum family and Solana.
How a coin stays at USD $1
The US GENIUS Act: what the law requires
Signed July 18, 2025. A licensed US stablecoin issuer must do three things.
- Back every coin 1:1 with cash, US Treasury bills maturing within 93 days, or similar safe assets.
- Publish its reserves every month.
- If it fails, pay coin holders first from those reserves.
The coins are not FDIC-insured (the law bans claiming they are). The rules take effect by January 18, 2027. Circle (USDC) won final approval for a federal trust bank charter in July 2026. Tether's USDT is issued offshore, outside the US licence. The law limits how US platforms can offer coins like it. Tether launched a separate US coin, USAT, issued through Anchorage Digital Bank.
A stablecoin is only as good as its reserves
In March 2023, Circle had USD $3.3 billion of its USD $40 billion in reserves at Silicon Valley Bank when it failed. USDC briefly fell to about USD $0.87 before recovering. The GENIUS rules exist to prevent a repeat.
If an app holds your coins, they're not your coins yet.
Bank to wallet, cheap and transparent.
Paytrie sends USDC straight to a wallet only you control. No exchange ever holds your money.
- Set up Rabby, your own walletA free self-custody wallet for Ethereum and its family of networks (Base, Arbitrum and more). Write the seed words on paper.
- Sign up with PaytrieVerify your ID once. Paytrie never holds your coins: you give it your Rabby address each time.
- Pay by e-TransferCADSend CAD from your bank by Interac e-Transfer, following the instructions Paytrie shows you. Fee: 0.6% flat (minimum CAD $5).
- USDC lands in RabbyPick a low-fee network like Base or Arbitrum. Send a small test amount first.
- Swap for ETH or bitcoinSwap inside Rabby for ETH, or for cbBTC (bitcoin held by Coinbase, mirrored 1:1 on other networks). Rabby's fee: 0.25%. Want to stay in US dollars? Skip this.
Sources: Paytrie and Wealthsimple published fees; Rabby swap fee. Spreads are not published. All sources
holds your coinsYou can also buy through an exchange like Wealthsimple. It's one app, but it takes longer and costs more. New deposits from a linked bank account are held up to 5 business days before coins can leave. You pay a 0.5% fee plus a price spread it doesn't publish. Until you withdraw, the exchange holds custody: the coins are in its name, and you're trusting it not to freeze, fail or get hacked. With Paytrie and Rabby, only your seed phrase controls the coins from the first minute. Not your keys, not your coins.
Reference
- Objections, answered
- Why hold it, and is it too late?
- Myths, checked
- Check yourself, then the cheat sheet
What are the hard objections, and do you really understand it now?
Can it be broken? The security questions.
What if one group controls more than half the network?
They could block payments and reverse their own recent ones. They could not take coins from your wallet (that needs your key) or create coins beyond the rules (every node would reject them). On Bitcoin it would take more mining power than the rest of the world combined. Most miners join pools that share rewards, and in 2025 two pools found over half of all blocks. Pools can't move your coins, but together they could slow or block some payments.
- Block some payments
- Reverse its own recent payments
- Take coins from your wallet
- Create coins beyond the rules
Won't quantum computers break it?
Not today. 2026 research estimates breaking Bitcoin's signatures needs roughly 26,000 to 500,000 physical qubits (the basic parts of a quantum computer). The biggest machines today have a few thousand, and they make many errors. About 30% of bitcoin sits in addresses whose public key is already visible, the most exposed. A fix (BIP-360) is published as a draft proposal, not adopted or switched on.
What if I lose my seed phrase?
If the wallet app is gone too, the coins are gone for good: no company can reset it. That's the flip side of nobody being able to freeze them. Two paper copies in two safe places is the usual answer.
Can't someone just copy Bitcoin?
They can copy the code, which is public, and many have; in 2017 a group split off Bitcoin Cash. What can't be copied is the network: the miners, the computing power and the people who already trust it.
Nothing backs it. Which is exactly the pitch.
The big-picture questions, answered straight.
What actually backs it?
Nothing backs a dollar either: a dollar is backed by trust and law. Bitcoin is backed by four things working together. It's scarce by rule (only 21 million, ever). It's expensive to attack (you'd need more computing power than every other miner on Earth combined). It's easy to carry (12 or 24 words can move any amount across any border). And it's useful because millions of people already accept it.
Scarce by rule. Gold is rare because of where we live. Bitcoin is rare because every computer on the network rejects any block that pays out more than the schedule allows. The cap is 21 million, about USD $1.76 trillion at today's price of about USD $84,000.
Expensive to attack. To rewrite the record you would need more mining machines, and more electricity to run them, than the rest of the world combined. The longer the chain runs, the more work an attacker has to redo.
Easy to carry. Your coins live on the network. What you carry is the seed phrase: 12 or 24 plain words, written on paper or memorized.
Useful because others accept it. Like a phone network, money gets more useful the more people use it.
Is that "intrinsic value"? People argue about that for everything, gold included. Value is a relationship between a thing and the people who want it, so this guide lists the properties and lets you judge.
Compared with gold
| Gold | Bitcoin | |
|---|---|---|
| Why it's scarce | Where we are (circumstance) | The code (rule) |
| Storing it | Vaults, guards, insurance | 12 or 24 words |
| Selling it | A dealer, at a discount | Any wallet or exchange |
| At a border | Can be seized | Words you can memorize |
| Total supply | Not known | 21 million |
Gold costs money to store (vaults, guards, insurance). Selling a bar means finding a dealer and taking a discount. Carrying it across a border can get it seized. Bitcoin's "bar" is a list of words you can write down or memorize and walk across any border.
The asteroid 16 Psyche, about 280 km wide, is 30% to 60% metal, mostly iron and nickel. A 2017 back-of-envelope estimate put its metal at about USD $10,000 quadrillion. The mission's lead scientist calls that number meaningless: nobody can bring it home, and if anyone did, metal prices would collapse. Nobody knows how much gold it holds. Gold is scarce by circumstance. Bitcoin is scarce by rule.
Sources: Bitcoin whitepaper; NASA JPL (Psyche); HowStuffWorks interview with Lindy Elkins-Tanton. All sources
Who made it, and who runs it?
Someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published the design on October 31, 2008, started the network on January 3, 2009, and stopped writing to other developers in April 2011. About 1.1 million coins are widely linked to Satoshi from mining patterns. They have never moved and would be worth about USD $92 billion today. Nobody runs Bitcoin now. There's no company, office or leader to shut down.
- Oct 31, 2008Design published
- Jan 3, 2009Network starts
- Dec 12, 2010Last forum post
- Apr 2011Last known emails
- TodayAbout 1.1 million coins linked to Satoshi have never moved
Isn't mining a waste of energy?
The energy is the security: it's what makes rewriting history expensive. Cambridge estimates mining uses about 138 terawatt-hours a year. That is a bit more than all of Argentina uses, and roughly 0.5% of the world's electricity. Miners in its survey say about 52% of their power comes from renewables and nuclear. Critics say the cost is too high; supporters say it buys a record no one can quietly edit. Ethereum, Solana and Sui stake instead.
Sources: Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report; Worldometer.
Why not use a bank instead?
For everyday things, a bank is easier: reversible and insured. It helps to know what a deposit is: legally, it's a loan to the bank. The money becomes the bank's, and the bank owes you. US banks have had no reserve requirement since March 2020. They earn the gap between what they pay you and what borrowers pay them. That gap averaged about 3.3% in mid-2026 (FDIC). Crypto wins when money must cross borders at any hour without anyone's permission. In 2022 people worldwide sent Ukraine about USD $100 million in crypto within about three weeks, much of it spent on food, medicine and protective gear.
The one kind of money nobody can print more of.
Governments owe more than they can ever pay back, and the easiest way out is to print more money. That quietly shrinks what the money in your pocket buys. Bitcoin is the one kind of money nobody can print more of.
The debt spiral
The US government owes about USD $40.2 trillion (September 30, 2026). The interest alone passed USD $1 trillion in the 2026 budget year: USD $1.017 trillion through August, more than the USD $876 billion spent on the military. Interest has nearly tripled since 2020, faster than any other big item in the budget, because the government borrows to pay interest on what it already borrowed. A government in this spot has three ways out: grow faster than the debt, don't pay, or print. Printing is the easy one.
* October 2025 to August 2026, 11 months. Source: US Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement.
The printing
In the year to February 2021, the US money supply grew about 27%, the fastest since World War II. There are now about 51% more dollars than in January 2020 (USD $15.4 trillion then, USD $23.3 trillion in August 2026).
About 51% more dollars. Source: Federal Reserve (FRED, M2).
The shrinking ruler
Measure a race with a ruler that keeps getting shorter, and every runner looks faster. Measured in dollars, lots of things go up. Measured in bitcoin, most things shrink. The NASDAQ, home of the world's biggest tech stocks, is down about 96% over ten years when you price it in bitcoin. Over the five years to Bitcoin's October 2025 peak, it lost about 82% in bitcoin terms.
One unit of the NASDAQ Composite, measured in bitcoin: down about 96%. Sources: FRED, Coinbase prices.
Bitcoin itself is about 33% below that peak right now (about USD $84,000 against about USD $126,000), and its price swings far harder than stocks.
Pristine collateral
Bankers call the safest thing to lend against "pristine collateral": easy to sell, priced every second, limited in supply, and impossible to fake more of. In 2008 the opposite blew up: bad home loans packaged to look safe. Bitcoin meets every point on that list except one. Its price isn't steady.
Sources: US Treasury (Debt to the Penny, Monthly Treasury Statement), FRED (M2, NASDAQ), Coinbase prices. All sources
Do I need a whole one? No.
You don't need a whole one. A bitcoin splits into 100 million pieces called sats, and USD $10 buys about 12,000 of them today. Most people buy a small amount every week or month and don't try to time the price. Whether it's too late depends on whether the printing in the last section continues.
Buying on a schedule ("dollar-cost averaging") means spending the same amount at regular times, whatever the price. When the price is low your money buys more sats; when it's high it buys fewer. You never catch the bottom, and you never buy everything at the top.
The same dollars buy more sats when the price is low and fewer when it's high.
If you trade in and out, use data instead of feelings. Asymmetry (asymmetry.ca) tracks a few of these numbers: where the price sits against its long-run trend, on-chain activity, and a risk score.
One of those trends is the power law: on a chart where both axes grow by multiples, about 15 years of bitcoin prices sit near a straight line. It's a model that has fit the past, not a law. It predicts smaller and smaller percentage gains over time, and nothing guarantees it keeps working. Asymmetry uses it to tell cheap from expensive, not to promise a price.
Ten things people believe. What's actually true.
Each myth below came from the big Bitcoin myth-busting sites. We kept only the answers that check out against primary sources, and fixed the ones that were out of date.
Governments can shut Bitcoin down.
A country can ban it inside its borders, but there's no company, server or boss to seize. China banned crypto mining in 2021. Within weeks about two-thirds of Bitcoin's computing power went offline. On July 3, 2021 the network cut its difficulty by 27.94%, the biggest drop ever. Blocks kept coming. About six months later computing power was nearly back, and by 2025 China was again the third-largest mining country. Bans hit the exchanges and miners in one country; the network itself kept running.
On July 3, 2021 the network cut its difficulty by 27.94% and kept making blocks. Source: Cambridge.
Developers or miners can change the rules, or print more coins.
Every full node checks every block against the same rules and throws out any that break them, like one that pays a miner too much. Anyone can propose a change; users decide which software to run. In 2017 big companies pushed a change (SegWit2x) that many users refused, and it was called off. Real bugs have happened, in 2010 and 2018, and both were fixed fast.
blog.lopp.net · betanews.com · en.bitcoin.it · bitcoincore.org
21 million coins isn't enough for the whole world.
Each bitcoin splits into 100 million units called satoshis, or sats. That's about 2.1 quadrillion sats in total. Prices can be quoted in sats, the way a dollar splits into cents.
Once new coins stop, miners stop and Bitcoin dies.
Each block pays new coins plus the fees inside it. New coins stop around 2140, and after that fees are all miners get. Today fees are under 1% of miner pay. Whether fees alone will pay for enough security is a real open question, and nobody knows the answer yet.
The price swings because it's a fad.
Supply is fixed by code, so when demand jumps or drops, supply can't adjust and the whole change lands on the price. There's no central bank smoothing it. The swings have shrunk as the market grew: yearly volatility (how much the price typically swings in a year) peaked near 97% in 2021 and was near 66% in 2023. That's still more than most large stocks.
Bitcoin has been hacked.
Nobody has broken the network's math. The big thefts hit companies that held coins for their customers: Mt. Gox lost about 850,000 BTC in 2014. It later found about 200,000; at today's price the other 650,000 would be worth about USD $54 billion. That's the custody risk from the wallets section, not a flaw in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's price is set by the cost of mining it.
It runs the other way. When the price rises, mining pays better, so more machines join. The difficulty loop then makes the puzzle harder, which costs more power. Mining cost chases the price, with a lag.
The math behind Bitcoin is unproven.
Bitcoin's hash function, SHA-256, is a US federal standard published by NIST. Its signatures use elliptic-curve math, plus Schnorr signatures since the 2021 Taproot upgrade. Nobody can prove math will never break; what it has is decades of experts trying in public and failing.
Insiders got the coins first.
There was no presale. From January 2009 anyone could run the free software and mine, and few did because the coins were worth nothing. Researchers estimate Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi, mined about 1.1 million coins, which have stayed untouched. That figure is an estimate from mining patterns.
Bitcoin can never handle as many payments as Visa.
On its main chain alone, it can't: it handles a handful of payments per second, and Visa says its network can handle over 65,000. Bitcoin keeps blocks small so ordinary computers can check every rule. Faster layers like the Lightning Network run on top for small payments. Solana and Sui chose to fit more on the main chain instead.
Further reading: the Bitcoin Wiki Myths page (34 myths) and EndTheFUD.org. Both are useful, and both have some answers that are dated or one-sided, so check the numbers.
Test yourself before you look.
Say each answer out loud before you tap. Pulling it from memory is what makes it stick; re-reading barely does.
One more: in one sentence, explain to a friend why Bitcoin is hard to cheat.
Everything, on one screen.
| Bitcoin | Ethereum | Solana | Sui | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bank analogy | Savings | Chequing | Tap-to-pay | Tap-to-pay |
| Safety | Safest | 2nd safest | Younger, faster | Youngest, fastest |
| Main job | Store value | Run apps and contracts | Fast, cheap payments | Fast, cheap payments |
| Launched | 2009 | 2015 | 2020 | 2023 |
| Who writes pages | Miners (electricity) | Stakers (deposit) | Stakers | Stakers |
| Final after | ~60 min (6 blocks) | ~12.8 min | ~13 s | ~0.4 s |
| Supply | Fixed: 21 million | No fixed cap | No fixed cap | Max 10 billion |
SWIPE THE TABLE
Glossary
- Blockchain
- A shared record of every payment, copied on many independent computers.
- Hash
- A fingerprint of some data. Change the data and the fingerprint changes completely.
- Nonce
- The number a miner keeps changing to find a winning fingerprint.
- Difficulty
- How hard the puzzle is. Adjusts every 2,016 blocks to keep about 10-minute blocks.
- Mining
- Trying hashes with electricity to win the right to add the next block.
- Staking
- Locking up coins as a deposit to win the right to add the next block.
- Smart contract
- A program on a blockchain that runs by itself, like a vending machine.
- Finality
- The point where a payment is treated as permanent.
- Private key / seed phrase
- The secret that proves you own your coins. Never share it.
- Stablecoin
- A coin built to always equal one unit of a regular currency, like one US dollar (USDC, USDT) or one Canadian dollar (CADC).
- Satoshi (sat)
- The smallest unit of bitcoin: one hundred-millionth of a coin.
- Custody
- Who holds the keys: you (self-custody) or a company (an exchange).
Every number, and where it came from.
110 sources, grouped by part. Primary sources (laws, protocol docs, official data) were used wherever they exist. Facts are current as of October 1, 2026. Items marked OWN RUN are calculations anyone can repeat.
Foundations
en.bitcoin.it
en.bitcoin.it
ethereum.org
sui.io
docs.sui.io
en.wikipedia.org
Bitcoin
bitcoinmagazine.com
mempool.space
pickaxe.io
mempool.space
coinwarz.com
en.bitcoin.it
bitcoincore.org
bitcoinmagazine.com
youngplatform.com
bitpay.com
finance.yahoo.com
api.coingecko.com
cdic.ca
stealthex.io
blackrock.com
bitbo.io
chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
thenextweb.com
en.bitcoin.it
The other networks
docs.openzeppelin.com
theblock.co
ethereum.org
helius.dev
lcx.com
theblock.co
spark.money
crowdfundinsider.com
theblock.co
tether.io
ethereum.org
Using it
github.com
stablecoininsider.org
circle.com
betakit.com
cov.com
paxos.com
theblock.co
theblock.co
unchainedcrypto.com
bloomberg.com
cnbc.com
faq.paytrie.com
ethereum.org
crypto-economy.com
faq.paytrie.com
faq.paytrie.com
theblock.co
wealthsimple.com
help.wealthsimple.com
help.wealthsimple.com
Reference
chain.link
postquantum.com
theblock.co
pma.caltech.edu
kucoin.com
github.com
bitcoinmagazine.com
en.wikipedia.org
coindesk.com
benzinga.com
gemini.com
jbs.cam.ac.uk
betanews.com
blog.lopp.net
cryptobriefing.com
rpc.cfainstitute.org
mprnews.org
developer.bitcoin.org
cointelegraph.com
jbs.cam.ac.uk
fiscaldata.treasury.gov
fiscaldata.treasury.gov
fred.stlouisfed.org
fred.stlouisfed.org
federalreserve.gov
en.wikipedia.org
content.govdelivery.com
science.howstuffworks.com
worldometers.info
decrypt.co
theblock.co
en.bitcoin.it
endthefud.org