Bitcoin

Sound money you can hold yourself.

The original peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 21 million coins, ten-minute blocks, no foundation, no roadmap, no CEO to subpoena. Mining secures the chain through SHA-256 proof-of-work; nodes verify the rules independently. The first money in human history that no committee can debase, freeze, or revoke.

Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.

A censorship-resistant social protocol. Identity is a secp256k1 keypair, the same curve Bitcoin uses. Events are signed JSON, broadcast to relays clients subscribe to. NIPs (Nostr Implementation Possibilities) extend the protocol — NIP-57 wires Lightning zaps directly into posts. No accounts, no platform, no recovery if you lose the key. Bitcoin culture's native social layer.

Inscribed fungible tokens.

A fungible token standard built on top of Ordinals inscriptions. Each token-mint is an inscription containing a tiny JSON object: {p:'brc-20', op:'mint', tick, amt}. The protocol is brutally inefficient — every transfer is a new inscription — but went viral on Bitcoin in March 2023, drove fees to multi-year highs, and proved fungibles could live on Bitcoin. Runes (April 2024) replaced it for serious use, but BRC-20 was the proof.

Chaumian ecash for Bitcoin.

A mint custodies sats and issues blinded tokens — cryptographic bearer notes — that users hold as text strings. The mint can't link issuance to redemption, so payments inside the mint are private by default. Reference implementation lives alongside a growing wallet ecosystem: Minibits, Nutstack, eNuts. Custodial, private, instant — closer to digital cash than anything else shipping.

Community banks, cryptographically verified.

Pools Bitcoin into a federation of guardians who issue Chaumian ecash tokens redeemable 1:1. Cash-like privacy — the mint can't see who holds what — while the federation handles custody, Lightning routing, and recovery. The trust model is a community bank, not self-custody: you trust your village's federation, not a corporation. Best fit for circular economies where users already know each other.

Sub-cent payments at internet scale.

Routes payments across HTLC-locked channels without touching the base chain. Two parties open a channel with an on-chain funding tx, then exchange signed balance updates off-chain. Phoenix and Wallet of Satoshi made it tappable. The hard part isn't sending — it's inbound liquidity, channel rebalancing, and watchtowers. Sub-cent settlement, with custody trade-offs the user has to understand.

Two-minute Bitcoin sidechain.

Federated sidechain — a two-way peg secured by a rotating set of functionaries. Two-minute blocks, Confidential Transactions hiding amounts and asset types by default, and issued assets (L-BTC, L-USDt, tokenized securities). The federation model is openly trusted: you're trading the full base-layer security for faster settlement and privacy. Used heavily by exchanges for inter-desk Bitcoin movement.

The block explorer for the rest of us.

Open-source, self-hostable block explorer and fee visualiser. Real-time mempool, fee-rate forecasts, lightning-network graph view, mining-pool dashboards, address indexing — built for plebs who want to verify their own chain rather than trust a third-party API. Runs on your own node if you want it to. The reference reading interface for active Bitcoiners.

Inscriptions on individual sats.

Inscribes arbitrary data onto individual satoshis using the witness section made cheap by Taproot (BIP-341) and SegWit. Each sat gets an ordinal number based on mining order, turning fungible coins into addressable units. Inscriptions store images, text, even small programs directly on-chain — no IPFS, no metadata server. Triggered the 2023 fee spike, the BRC-20 experiment, and the durable conviction split inside Bitcoin culture.

Fungible tokens, UTXO-native.

A fungible token protocol on Bitcoin that lives in the UTXO set rather than as inscriptions. Launched at the April 2024 halving block. Cleaner than BRC-20 because Runes don't bloat the chain with inscription metadata — they're encoded in OP_RETURN outputs. Uniswap-shaped trading on Magic Eden Runes; the cohort is volatile but architecturally sound.

Permanent on-chain artefacts.

Bitcoin Stamps embed data directly in the UTXO set itself rather than the witness data — making them genuinely unprunable, unlike Ordinals which rely on witness data that nodes could in theory drop. The trade-off is much higher cost per byte. SRC-20 standard followed for fungible tokens. Smaller cultural footprint than Ordinals; technically the most permanent on-chain artefact.