About This Book

You look up 'how Bitcoin works' and get two kinds of answers: shallow explainers that stop at 'digital gold,' or developer docs written for programmers. Neither helps you make real decisions — buying, custody, tax reporting, what happens when you die.

This book is the missing middle. It covers how Bitcoin works from first transaction to inheritance planning, written by someone in the Swiss crypto industry, verified against the whitepaper and BIPs.

Every chapter started the same way: a question I couldn't answer well enough. I'd ask AI specific questions — what are Ordinals? How are satoshis represented in code? What does a full inscription transaction look like? — then verify every answer against the Bitcoin source code, the whitepaper, BIP proposals, and independent blog posts.

AI helped me research, draft, and structure the text. The verification, fact-checking, and editorial decisions are mine. I read the Bitcoin source code. I cross-checked AI outputs against blogs and documentation. Where the book references data (network stats, fee ranges, ETF flows), those numbers come from public APIs and are updated periodically.