104 THE CONNECTED BITCOIN ATLAS
Understand one idea.
Follow the whole system.
Every entry is a coordinate, not an island. Move from the monetary rule to the code that enforces it, the people who shaped it and the trade-offs it creates.
Bitcoin
A peer-to-peer monetary network with a native, digitally scarce asset and no central issuer.
Satoshi Nakamoto
The pseudonymous author of the Bitcoin whitepaper and the original Bitcoin software.
Bitcoin Whitepaper
The nine-page design paper announced by Satoshi Nakamoto on 31 October 2008.
Genesis Block
Bitcoin’s first block, mined by Satoshi Nakamoto on 3 January 2009.
Timechain
Bitcoin’s proof-of-work-ordered history of valid blocks.
Proof of Work
A costly-to-produce, easy-to-verify signal that orders Bitcoin’s block history.
Mining
The competitive process that proposes new blocks and secures Bitcoin with proof of work.
Full Node
Software that independently verifies Bitcoin’s blocks and transactions against its consensus rules.
Difficulty Adjustment
Bitcoin’s automatic mechanism for keeping average block production near ten minutes.
Transaction
A signed data structure that consumes existing outputs and creates new spendable outputs.
UTXO
A discrete chunk of bitcoin created by a transaction and not yet spent.
Private Key
A secret number used to authorize spending under Bitcoin’s cryptographic rules.
Wallet
Software or hardware that manages keys, constructs transactions and presents a usable view of funds.
Block Subsidy
New bitcoin a miner may create in a valid block under the issuance schedule.
Halving
The programmed 50% reduction in Bitcoin’s block subsidy every 210,000 blocks.
21 Million
The asymptotic maximum created by Bitcoin’s subsidy schedule and unit precision.
Mempool
A node’s local set of valid, unconfirmed transactions available for relay and mining.
Transaction Fees
The difference between a transaction’s input and output values, paid to the miner that confirms it.
Segregated Witness
A 2017 protocol upgrade that separated signature data and introduced block weight.
Taproot
A 2021 Bitcoin upgrade combining Schnorr signatures with more private and efficient script commitments.
Lightning Network
A network of Bitcoin payment channels for fast, low-value and high-frequency transfers.
Block
A validated batch of transactions committed to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work history.
Block header
An 80-byte structure miners hash to commit to a block, its predecessor and transaction set.
Cryptographic hash
A fixed-size fingerprint used throughout Bitcoin for identifiers, commitments and proof of work.
SHA-256
The hash function at the core of Bitcoin mining and many protocol commitments.
Merkle tree
A hash tree that commits a block header to every transaction in the block.
Bitcoin address
A human-facing encoding of payment conditions, not an account or permanent identity.
Recovery seed
Words that encode wallet entropy and can regenerate a deterministic set of keys.
BIP 39
The widely used mnemonic standard for converting entropy into a word sequence and seed.
HD wallet
A hierarchical deterministic wallet derives many keys and accounts from one root secret.
Multisignature
A spending policy that requires a defined threshold of several keys.
Cold storage
A custody setup that keeps signing secrets away from internet-connected systems.
Hardware wallet
A dedicated signing device designed to isolate private keys from a general-purpose computer.
Watch-only wallet
A wallet that monitors addresses and balances without holding the keys needed to spend.
Coin control
The deliberate selection of which UTXOs a wallet spends in a transaction.
Change output
The output that returns unspent value from a selected UTXO back under the spender’s control.
Confirmation
A transaction gains one confirmation when included in a block and more as blocks build above it.
Double-spend
An attempt to spend the same bitcoin value through conflicting transactions.
Coinbase transaction
The first transaction in a block, created by the miner to claim subsidy and fees.
Bitcoin Script
Bitcoin’s deliberately limited language for expressing conditions that authorize spending.
Soft fork
A backward-compatible tightening of consensus rules enforced by upgraded nodes.
Hard fork
A non-backward-compatible rule change that can split participants onto incompatible chains.
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal
A standardized design document for proposing Bitcoin features, processes or information.
Consensus rules
The validity rules each fully validating node independently applies to blocks and transactions.
Chain reorganization
A node replaces its current chain tip when it learns of a valid branch with more accumulated work.
Stale block
A valid block that loses a temporary race and is not part of the most-work chain.
ASIC miner
Specialized hardware optimized for Bitcoin’s SHA-256 proof-of-work computation.
Mining pool
A coordinator that aggregates miners’ work and distributes rewards under a payout scheme.
Hashrate
The estimated number of proof-of-work hash attempts performed per second.
Nonce
A block-header field miners vary while searching for a hash below the target.
Fee rate
The transaction fee relative to virtual size, commonly measured in satoshis per vbyte.
Replace-by-fee
A policy allowing an unconfirmed transaction to be replaced by one paying a higher fee.
Child pays for parent
A high-fee child transaction can raise the economic priority of its unconfirmed parent package.
Timelock
A transaction or spending condition that becomes valid only after a time or block threshold.
HTLC
A hash-and-time conditional transfer used to route atomic Lightning payments.
Payment channel
A shared on-chain output whose allocation can be updated privately before final settlement.
Watchtower
A Lightning service that watches for obsolete channel states and can broadcast a remedy.
Lightning liquidity
Spendable channel balance in the direction required for a routed Lightning payment.
Lightning routing
The discovery and use of a channel path capable of carrying a payment to its destination.
Extended public key
A public HD-wallet key that can derive addresses without revealing private signing keys.
Output descriptor
A compact, checksummed description of the scripts and keys a wallet should watch or spend.
PSBT
A portable format for coordinating transaction construction and signatures across devices or parties.
CoinJoin
A collaborative transaction structure that makes simple input-to-output ownership mapping harder.
Bitcoin privacy
The practices and protocol properties that limit unwanted linkage of identities, balances and transactions.
Pseudonymity
Bitcoin exposes public transaction identifiers without inherently attaching legal names.
Know Your Customer
Identity verification imposed by regulated service providers before or during customer access.
Self-custody
Direct control of the private keys required to authorize spending, with no custodian in the path.
Custodial exchange
A trading service that controls customer keys and records claims in its own ledger.
Satoshi
The smallest native Bitcoin unit: one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin.
Fiat money
Money whose monetary status and base supply are administered through state and central-bank institutions.
Austrian economics
A school emphasizing subjective value, individual choice, capital structure and monetary institutions.
Sound money
A normative monetary ideal centered on durable purchasing power and resistance to discretionary expansion.
Dollar-cost averaging
Investing equal currency amounts at regular intervals rather than choosing a single entry time.
Volatility
The magnitude and frequency of price variation over a chosen period.
Market capitalization
Current unit price multiplied by estimated circulating supply; a comparison metric, not cash invested.
Spot Bitcoin ETP
An exchange-traded product designed to track bitcoin held by a regulated custodian.
Blocksize War
The 2015–2017 conflict over Bitcoin scaling, activation power and the role of users, miners and businesses.
Bitcoin Core
The most widely used open-source implementation of a fully validating Bitcoin node and wallet.
Testnet
A public Bitcoin-like network whose coins have no intended value and are used for testing.
Sidechain
A separate ledger connected to bitcoin through a peg and its own security model.
Liquid Network
A federated Bitcoin sidechain focused on faster settlement and confidential asset transfers.
Cypherpunks
A movement that used cryptography and code to pursue privacy, autonomy and open digital systems.
Hashcash
Adam Back’s reusable proof-of-work concept, cited by the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Bitcoin Pizza Day
The 22 May commemoration of a 2010 purchase of two pizzas for 10,000 BTC.
Prague Bitcoin ecosystem
A dense cluster of globally influential Bitcoin hardware, mining, privacy, education and community projects.
SatoshiLabs
The Prague company formed around Trezor and open-source tools for cryptocurrency security.
Trezor
The Prague-born product that launched the commercial hardware-wallet category in 2014.
Marek “Slush” Palatinus
Czech Bitcoin builder associated with the first mining pool, Stratum V1 and Trezor.
Pavol “Stick” Rusnák
Open-source developer and SatoshiLabs co-founder central to Trezor’s architecture.
brmlab
The Prague hackerspace where the future Trezor founders met and explored Bitcoin.
Braiins
A Prague-rooted Bitcoin mining company operating a pool, firmware and open mining protocols.
Braiins Pool
The longest-running Bitcoin mining pool, launched in Prague in 2010 as Slush Pool.
Stratum V1
The pool-mining communication protocol introduced by Marek Palatinus and widely adopted by the industry.
Stratum V2
A more secure and efficient open mining protocol that can return transaction selection to hashers.
Paralelní Polis
Prague’s Institute of Cryptoanarchy, connecting Bitcoin, privacy, art and voluntary parallel institutions.
Bitcoin Coffee
The Prague café that turned cryptocurrency-only payments into a public adoption experiment.
Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis
An international Prague conference on freedom, cryptography, decentralization and parallel society.
BTC Prague
A large international Bitcoin-only conference and expo held in Prague.
ChainCamp
An Ostrava Bitcoin community conference known for Czech and Slovak talks and practical workshops.
Bitcoinovej Kanál
Jakub “Kicom” Vejmola’s Czech-language Bitcoin education channel founded in 2019.
Josef Tětek
Czech author, educator and analyst known for Bitcoin writing, talks and the Stackuj project.
Stackuj
A Czech Bitcoin education, publishing and podcast project associated with Josef Tětek.
Alza Bitcoin payments
The Czech retailer’s acceptance of bitcoin since 2017, later extended to Lightning payments.
Bitcoin education
Source-based teaching that connects protocol mechanics, economics, security and practical use.
Knowledge network
The lines are the product. Each page includes curated relationships and automatically generated backlinks.