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Learning path

Understand Bitcoin through a payment

Follow spendable outputs, signing conditions and confirmations before comparing application designs.

Take the example payment: identify the consumed output, the change output and the spending condition. Then explain why seeing a transaction in a wallet is different from accepting it under a confirmation policy.

The Bitcoin overview explains confirmations and reorganizations. The finality lesson then uses Ethereum as a comparison; it does not describe Bitcoin’s consensus.

Along this path

  1. How does Bitcoin prevent an output being spent twice?

    Understand UTXOs, independent validation and accumulated work.

  2. Bitcoin UTXOs: where change comes from

    Follow one output through a payment and its change.

  3. Bitcoin Script: conditions for spending

    Distinguish spending conditions from application hosting.

  4. What does proof of work prove?

    A cheap-to-check result reflects a costly search.

  5. Why does “immutable” need conditions?

    Receiving a transaction, including it in a block and finalizing history provide different evidence.

  6. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Circle Arc, Base and ArcBlock

    Compare state, execution and application responsibilities.