There's a version of learning Bitcoin where you read the whitepaper, nod along, and move on. Then there's the version where you're staring at a terminal at 11pm wondering why two nodes refuse to talk to each other then you actually understand the answer when you figure it out.
We did the second version. This article is what came out of it.
By the end of one week, I understood what Bitcoin actually is under the hood, why the Lightning Network exists, what a payment channel really means, and what it looks like to build all of this from zero, in a local test environment.
No hype. No "Bitcoin is the future" takes. Just the engineering.
First: What Is Bitcoin, Actually?
