The Case for Bitcoin and the Rise of Digital Money

The best way to understand crypto — how a blockchain works, why it matters, how the space has evolved — is to start with Bitcoin. The original cryptocurrency continues to dominate all other forms of digital money—it’s most people’s gateway to the wider crypto world, and its technology provides the foundation for a lot of what came after. Here are some of the best explanations of what Bitcoin is and how it gave rise to the entire crypto ecosystem.

• Explain Bitcoin Like I’m Five (Angel investor Nik Custodio does exactly what the title says)
• Ben Horowitz explains the rise of crypto (a 3-minute explanation of crypto’s potential)
• But how does Bitcoin actually work? (Invaluable, easy-to-understand YouTube explainer)  
• An Intro to Crypto: Building Blocks (Crypto venture-fund founder and former Coinbase Product Manager Linda Xie breaks down the core concepts linking Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more)
• Why Bitcoin Matters (Marc Andreessen, investor and Coinbase board member, makes the case for digital money in a 2014 New York Times essay )
• The Internet of Money (Investor Naval Ravikant’s Wired article that introduced a lot of people to Bitcoin’s wider potential)
• Bitcoin whitepaper: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2009 whitepaper that started it all – technical, but more readable than you’d assume)
• Cryptocurrency: The Future of Finance and Money (In this four-minute video, experts from Coinbase and across the crypto universe dive into the democratizing potential of cryptocurrency)