Bitcoin
The basics, buying, and trouble with a payment. Choose according to what you need right now. You can return to the guides at any time and keep reading in the magazine.
Bitcoin arose as an answer to a specific technical problem: how to send value over the internet without a bank having to confirm the transaction. Here is a brief route from the 2008 paper to the pizza payment of 2010.
Bitcoin is often called anonymous. It is more accurate to say that transactions are public and addresses carry no name. How easily an address is linked to a particular person depends on how you handle it.
Whoever controls the private keys controls the bitcoin. An overview of the choice between your own wallet and a custodian, what a backup of the recovery phrase is for, and why you should never enter it on a website.
Bitcoin basics, technology, buying and security.
A BTC withdrawal has two sides: the request at the exchange and the receipt in your own wallet. A practical procedure helps you check the network, the address, the net amount and the status of the transfer.
A miner searches for a new block, a full node checks its validity. These roles may meet in one operator, but each answers a different question.
An identifier helps you find a transaction. On its own, however, it does not prove that the money has been received. When checking a payment, you need to tell apart the address, the TXID, the amount and the confirmations.
A wallet shows a balance, but a Bitcoin transaction spends earlier outputs. Using a model payment, we distinguish the amount for the recipient, the change returned and the fee.
Fraudulent investment offers often make use of cryptocurrencies. An overview of warning signs according to the Czech National Bank, the Czech Police and the European supervisory authorities, and how to deal with an offer.
We compare four technical features of Bitcoin with four investment risks highlighted by regulators.
The Lightning Network is a layer on top of Bitcoin that allows payments off the blockchain through a network of payment channels. Speed has its price: liquidity, channel management and risks that are good to know about.
We explain why a Bitcoin payment may have to wait for confirmation and how block capacity, transaction size and the fee rate are connected.
DCA means buying for the same amount at regular intervals, regardless of the current price. We explain how it works using hypothetical figures and show what regular purchases cannot address.
Before your first purchase, be clear about what you are buying, how much you will pay in total and how you will get the bitcoin into your own wallet. The guide leads you through the individual decisions without recommending a particular exchange; specific services serve only as examples from their documentation.
Bitcoin aims for an average spacing of blocks of around ten minutes. The difficulty of the search adjusts in periods of 2,016 blocks, but it sets no fixed deadline for an individual block.
One bitcoin consists of 100 million satoshis. A conversion does not change the value of an amount, only how it is written. Using model examples, we show conversions and the difference between an amount and a fee rate.