Lifeboat — learn Bitcoin, one small step at a time
Free, bite-sized daily lessons on Bitcoin, personal finance, and self-sovereignty. Interactive courses, games, and simulators — about three minutes a day, no account needed.
The core path — start here
- 📖 The Story of Money — Why does saving feel so hard?
You've used money every day of your life — but what is it, where did it come from, and why does saving in it feel like running uphill? Five short lessons that end with you understanding the problem better than most people ever will. - 🟠 Enter Bitcoin — How do you fix money?
Pillar 1 showed you what's broken. This is the proposed fix: where Bitcoin came from, why 21 million is a hard limit, how a network with nobody in charge still agrees on the rules, and what actually separates it from the thousands of tokens that copied it. - ⚙️ How Bitcoin Actually Works — Okay, but how does it work?
Under the hood, in plain language. What actually proves you own bitcoin, what happens between hitting send and being confirmed, why mining secures anything at all, how blocks chain together, and who checks that everyone is playing by the rules. - ⛵ Self-Sovereignty & the Stoic Path — What do I actually do with this?
The last pillar brings it back to you. Holding your own keys, patience as a superpower, the two piles the Stoics sorted the world into, and the small weekly habit that beats every attempt to time the market — finishing with a recap of everything across all four pillars.
Electives — go deeper
- 🏰 The Bitcoin Moat — Why code can be copied, but trust can't
Bitcoin's code is free to copy — thousands have tried. So why hasn't a copy ever become Bitcoin? Four short lessons on the assets that can't be forked: security, time, trust, and the crowd. - 🧭 Money Mindset — Personal finance foundations
The habits underneath the theory: pay yourself first, build a lifeboat fund, let compounding work, and borrow the stoic calm that makes it stick. - 🟠 Fix Your Money (classic) — The original sound-money track
The original Pillar 2, kept as an elective: what makes money good, how ours broke in 1971, how the printer works, and the case for Bitcoin as digital gold — plus the myths worth busting. - ⚙️ How Bitcoin Works (classic) — The original under-the-hood track
The original Pillar 4, kept as an elective: the shared ledger, mining and block rewards, the 21-million cap and halving, and the self-adjusting difficulty clock — no code or math. - 🗝️ Fix Your Future (classic) — The original self-custody track
The original self-custody pillar, kept as an elective: wallets, the 12 words, scam-spotting, the custody ladder, and stacking sats — explained without fear, practiced without risk. - 🏛️ Austrian Economics 101 — The school of thought behind Bitcoin's design
Bitcoin didn't come from nowhere — it came from a specific tradition in economics. Five short lessons on the Austrian School: why it starts with individuals instead of aggregates, where value actually comes from, what prices are really saying, and its theory of why booms end in busts. One school among several, presented as the one that shaped Bitcoin. - 🕰️ Bitcoin's History & Key Events — From whitepaper to Wall Street — and what each milestone proves
Six short lessons on the moments that tested Bitcoin: a whitepaper nobody noticed, a governance war it nearly lost, the exchange collapse that's still being paid out twelve years later, and the slow arrival of companies and governments. Not trivia — a record of stress tests its core rules passed without bending. - 🏦 The Fiat System — Central banks, the end of gold, and why the debt keeps growing
Pillar 1 showed you what's wrong with the money. This is how it got that way: the first central banks and who they were built to serve, what a gold standard actually constrained, the 1971 broadcast that cut the last link, and why government debt has only ratcheted upward since. Not a conspiracy — a chain of reasonable decisions with one direction. - 🪜 The Custody Spectrum — ETFs, exchanges, self-custody, multisig — and what you trade at each step
Five lessons on the one question that decides everything: who holds the key? From an ETF that never lets you touch one, through exchange IOUs and the hot/cold split, to multisig setups where losing a key isn't a catastrophe. Every rung gets its real pros before its cons — the goal is choosing your spot on purpose, not sliding to an extreme by default. - 🔍 Bitcoin vs. "Crypto" — Proof of work, decentralization, and why they aren't the same conversation
There are more than 10,000 cryptocurrencies and almost none of them work like Bitcoin. Five lessons on the actual structural differences: pre-mines and founder allocations, how proof of work and proof of stake really differ, the strongest case for each, and what decentralization is genuinely protecting. Both models get explained on their own terms before either gets argued against. - ⚡ The Lightning Network — Instant, global, and nearly free — how Bitcoin scales for spending
Bitcoin's base layer does about seven transactions a second, which is fine for settlement and hopeless for coffee. Five lessons on the layer built to fix that: why block space is scarce, how a payment channel turns hundreds of payments into two on-chain transactions, how routing reaches someone you've never met without trusting anyone in between, and what using it actually looks like — including the liquidity limits nobody mentions in the pitch.
This week in Bitcoin
🛡️ Bitcoin didn’t break. A sidechain did. — A software bug minted unbacked coins on a Bitcoin sidechain — and Bitcoin’s base layer never noticed. A lesson in what the layers are for.
The Toolbox
44 hands-on games and simulators — back up a practice wallet, race rival miners, route a Lightning payment, watch inflation eat cash.