Interactive lesson4 min
What actually happens when you send bitcoin?
Follow one payment from your wallet to a block, and account for every sat along the way.
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Make sense of the mechanisms.
Follow a question, experiment with an idea, or take the guided path. There’s more than one way to understand.
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Follow a Bitcoin payment
An everyday action connects wallets, outputs, fees, and confirmation. Read the path in order, at your own pace.
01Your wallet, your keys, and your bitcoin: what lives where?
02What actually happens when you send bitcoin?
03UTXOs and change: why one payment can create two outputs
04Bitcoin transaction fees and virtual size
05Pending, confirmed, and reorganized: a payment’s changing status
06How a Lightning channel works
6 published articles
Visual guide3 min
Your wallet, your keys, and your bitcoin: what lives where?
Separate the app on your phone from signing authority and the outputs recorded by the network.
Read the guideVisual guide3 min
UTXOs and change: why one payment can create two outputs
Work through coin selection without imagining a single account balance being edited.
Read the guideVisual guide3 min
Bitcoin transaction fees and virtual size
A bigger payment does not necessarily make a bigger transaction. Separate amount, size, rate, and total fee.
Read the guideVisual guide3 min
Pending, confirmed, and reorganized: a payment’s changing status
A status label is an observation about a transaction and a chain, not a promise about the future.
Read the guideVisual guide3 min
Read a Bitcoin transaction explorer without getting lost
Use a fictional transaction to separate recorded facts from an explorer’s interpretations.
Read the guide