The Bitcoin Toolbox

Hands-on games and simulators. Play with them any time — no lesson required.

• 🎮 The Seed Phrase Game — Back up a practice wallet, lose your phone, restore it — safely.
  Bitcoin · A zero-risk fire drill for self-custody. Your practice wallet holds 1,000,000 fake sats: back it up, survive a "lost phone," and restore it from your 12 words. Skip the backup and see exactly what happens — without losing a single real sat.
• 📈 Compound Growth — Watch small, boring savings become a fortune.
  Personal Finance · Slide the monthly amount, the years, and the growth rate — and watch the curve bend. Notice how time beats amount: the most powerful ingredient in compounding is starting early, not starting big.
• 🕳️ Inflation Leak — See what the hidden tax does to cash savings.
  Economics · You save $10,000 in cash. Set an inflation rate and a number of years, and watch what it can actually buy shrink. Try the "official" rate — then try the rate that matches your grocery bill.
• 🌩️ Lightning Liquidity — Route payments through channels — until the liquidity runs dry.
  Bitcoin · The Lightning Network moves bitcoin instantly through payment channels — but a payment only succeeds if every hop has enough balance on the right side. Buy coffees, get paid, and discover why liquidity management is the heart of Lightning.
• 🧪 Money or Not? — Judge six things against money's three jobs.
  Economics · Money has exactly three jobs: store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. Test six candidates — gold, dollars, cigarettes, bread, stock, bitcoin — and find out which ones actually qualify.
• ⏳ Money's Timeline — Put 5,000 years of money in order — and see what each stage fixed.
  Economics · Barter, commodity money, gold, paper, fiat, bitcoin. Place each stage in the order it appeared, and each one reveals the problem it was invented to solve.
• 🍕 The Money Pizza — Print more money and watch your slice shrink.
  Economics · The money supply is a pizza cut into eight slices, and you hold one. Bake more slices into the same box and your slice is still one slice — just a smaller share of everything. See it as one big print, or as a few percent a year compounding quietly.
• 🚰 The Money Pipeline — New money reaches some people before others. Find your spot.
  Economics · New money enters the economy at one point and flows outward. Pick a persona — bank, corporation, small business, employee, retiree — and see where you sit relative to the tap, and what that position costs you.
• 🎂 Genesis Trivia — Four rapid questions on Bitcoin's origin story.
  Bitcoin · A whitepaper published during a financial crisis, a pseudonymous author, and a first block with a newspaper headline buried inside it. Test what you know about how Bitcoin began.
• 📉 Two Supply Curves — Slide to 2140 and watch one curve stop while the other doesn't.
  Economics · Bitcoin's issuance is scheduled, shrinking, and public — it flattens into a hard 21 million ceiling. A fiat money supply compounds indefinitely. Drag the year and compare them directly.
• ⚖️ Bank vs. Bitcoin — Sort each capability into the system it belongs to.
  Bitcoin · Who can freeze your account? Who can change the money supply on their own? Sort four capabilities between a bank and the Bitcoin network, and watch the pattern emerge.
• 🔍 Match the Middleman — Pair each trusted third party with what replaces it.
  Bitcoin · Bitcoin swaps "trust me" for "verify it yourself." Match each traditional middleman — the bank ledger, the company's word, the dispute line — with the mechanism that replaces it.
• 📡 Transaction Flow — Follow a payment from "send" to confirmed.
  Bitcoin · Hit send on Bitcoin and five things happen in order: your key signs it, it broadcasts to the world, it waits in the mempool, a miner packs it into a block, and it confirms. Put the journey in order and see what each stage really does.
• ⛏️ Guess the Hash — Race rival miners to roll under the target.
  Bitcoin · Mining is not skill — it's trying, over and over, until someone gets lucky. Race three rival miners for the block reward and feel why proof of work is expensive to produce but instant to verify.
• ⛓️ Spot the Broken Link — Find the tampered block — and watch the chain collapse after it.
  Bitcoin · Every block carries a reference to the one before it. Change an old transaction and that reference stops matching. Find the block where the chain breaks, then see how far the damage spreads.
• 🗝️ Rank the Risk — Order four custody methods from most trust required to least.
  Bitcoin · Custody isn't all-or-nothing. Leaving coins on an exchange, a custodial app, a hardware wallet, a multisig setup — each rung trades a little convenience for a lot less trust. Put them in order and see the trade-off behind every one.
• ⏳ Now vs. Later — Four honest choices — and what they say about your time preference.
  Mindset · No score, no right answer. Make four quick calls between a reward now and a bigger one later, and watch each one get labelled high or low time preference. It's a mirror, not a test.
• 🎯 Sort the Pile — The Stoic dichotomy of control, applied to your money.
  Mindset · Price crashes, scary headlines, your savings rate, whether you hold your own keys — sort six of them into what you control and what you don't. The "in my control" pile is short, and it contains everything that actually matters.
• 🧱 The Habit Builder — Pick a weekly amount. Watch the stack grow, one purchase at a time.
  Personal Finance · Set a small weekly amount and a horizon, and see the habit build brick by brick. No price, no returns, no forecast — this shows what showing up consistently adds up to, and nothing else.
• 🧭 Machine or Individual? — Sort five claims into the two ways of seeing an economy.
  Economics · One lens treats the economy as a machine with dials to turn. The other says it's millions of people acting on information nobody holds all of. Sort five statements between them — the game labels which school a claim belongs to, never which one is right.
• ⚖️ What's It Worth Right Now? — Water or diamonds? Same two things, three situations, different answers.
  Economics · Rank water against diamonds in a city, in a desert, and when you already own ten diamonds. Nothing about either good changes between rounds — only your circumstances. That gap is the subjective theory of value.
• 📉 Spot the Distorted Signal — Cap a price, guarantee a price — then predict what actually happens.
  Economics · A price is a message about what's scarce. Force it away from its natural level in three different markets and pick what follows: the shortage, the surplus, or the building that never gets built.
• 🎈 Inflate the Boom — Push rates under the natural rate and watch the boom swell — then correct.
  Economics · Austrian Business Cycle Theory in one slider: cheap credit inflates a boom that real savings can't finish, and the correction brings it back down. An illustration of the mechanism — not a model of any real economy, and not a forecast.
• 🕰️ Origin Timeline — Match four founding dates to what actually happened on them.
  History · The whitepaper, the genesis block, the first transaction, and two pizzas. Nineteen months from a PDF to somebody buying lunch — pair each date with its moment.
• 🗳️ Who Decides? — Four attempts to change the rules. Who actually has to agree?
  History · A corporate coalition, a mining majority, the biggest exchange in the world, and a change nearly everyone wants. Work out who can actually make a rule change stick — the answer is the same every time, and the last case shows it doesn't mean "nothing can change."
• 🏛️ Whose Bitcoin Is It? — Split your stack, then fail the exchange and see what survives.
  History · Slide how much you leave on an exchange versus hold yourself, then watch the exchange collapse. One half becomes a bankruptcy claim; the other never notices. This is "not your keys, not your coins" as arithmetic.
• 📊 Adoption Timeline — Order five milestones from corporate treasury to retirement accounts.
  History · MicroStrategy, Tesla, El Salvador, spot ETFs, and 70+ public companies. Put them in order and watch under five years pass between "fringe experiment" and "in your brokerage account" — including the one that went partly into reverse.
• ⚖️ Fact or Not Yet Law? — Proposed, passed one chamber, signed, later amended — tell them apart.
  History · Five claims about Bitcoin law and policy. Some are settled, some passed only one chamber, and one was quietly amended after the headlines moved on. Sorting them is a habit worth building — and the snapshot shows its own date, because law moves.
• 🏦 Central Bank Timeline — Match three central banks to the year and reason they were founded.
  History · Sweden's Riksbank, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve — 1668, 1694, 1913. Pair each with its origin and notice how often "help the government pay for something" appears in the founding brief.
• 🪙 Redeem or Print — Issue notes against a fixed gold reserve — then let everyone redeem.
  Economics · The gold in your vault doesn't grow. Issue as much currency against it as you like, watch the backing ratio fall, then open the redemption window and find out how far down the queue the gold actually reaches. This is the constraint a gold standard imposes, felt from the issuer's seat.
• 🚪 The Gold Window — 1944 to 1971, one tap at a time, until the window closes.
  History · Walk from Bretton Woods to August 15, 1971 and watch dollars held abroad climb past the gold behind them. Nothing is stolen and no law is broken — a promise simply stops being honoured, and the world keeps using the currency anyway.
• 🏃 The Debt Treadmill — Six rounds of national budgeting. Try to get the debt down.
  Economics · Wars, crashes and booms, with a real choice each round — and interest accruing on the whole balance throughout. Play it perfectly and the pile still grows, because crises are forced on you while paydowns are optional. That asymmetry is the ratchet, and you can see it in your own line.
• 🪜 Guess the Spectrum — Rank five custody options before you know anything about them.
  Bitcoin · ETF, exchange, hot wallet, hardware wallet, multisig — put them in order from least to most self-sovereign. Nothing is marked right or wrong: it's a pre-test, and the real order is revealed at the end of The Custody Spectrum course. See how much your instinct moves.
• 🧾 What Do You Actually Own? — Four purchases. Which ones leave you holding bitcoin?
  Bitcoin · An ETF, a hardware wallet, an exchange balance, a wallet app showing you twelve words. Sort each into a claim on somebody versus bitcoin you control — one question separates them all, and it is never the app you used.
• 🏛️ Exchange Risk Timeline — Mt. Gox, Celsius, FTX — match each collapse to what caused it.
  History · A hack, an insolvency, and a fraud. Three different causes with one identical outcome for customers: the withdrawal button stopped working. Documented history, not a hypothetical.
• 🌡️ Hot or Cold? — Four jobs. Which wallet fits each one?
  Bitcoin · Coffee money, a decade of savings, quick trades, an inheritance. Match the wallet to the job — and notice it splits evenly, because cold storage isn't "better," it's for the money you aren't spending.
• 🔍 Bitcoin or Typical Token? — Five structural claims. Which asset does each describe?
  Bitcoin · Pre-allocations, foundations that can change the supply, whether the founder got special treatment. None of it is about price — it's about who held what at the start and who can change the rules now.
• ⚖️ Match the Mechanism — Sort four features into proof of work and proof of stake.
  Bitcoin · Electricity and hardware on one side, locked-up coins on the other. Fill both buckets and the structural split shows up on its own: one model spends something the network cannot create, the other spends something it can.
• 🎯 Attack Cost Calculator — Two ways to buy control of a network — and two very different bills.
  Bitcoin · Slide the share you want to control and compare the cost structures: hardware you must keep powering versus supply you must buy on a market that moves against you. Deliberately unit-free — the point is the shape of the bill, not its size — and the strongest counter-argument is on screen too.
• 🌍 Rate the Decentralization — Four network profiles. How decentralized is each, really?
  Bitcoin · Hypothetical structures rated on a three-point scale, with the reasoning revealed each time. The skill is reading a structure — supply, operations, and who can change the rules are three separate questions, and a network can pass one while failing the others.
• 🧱 Fit the Block — Pack transactions into limited block space and watch fees climb.
  Bitcoin · Three blocks, more transactions than room. Pack each one, mine it, and see what gets bumped — then watch the fee rate go from 1× to 8× as the backlog bids harder. Notice which payments keep losing: the small everyday ones.
• 🧾 Run the Tab — Open a channel, pay back and forth, close it. Count the on-chain txs.
  Bitcoin · A payment channel is a bar tab. Open it once on-chain, send as many payments as you like instantly, then settle once. However many times you tap, the blockchain only ever sees two transactions.
• 🗺️ Trace the Route — You have no channel with the café. Find a path through people who do.
  Bitcoin · Tap your way from your wallet to the café through a network of open channels — only real hops are accepted. There's more than one valid route, and every hop is locked by the same secret, so the whole payment settles or none of it does.
• 🏁 The Race — Send the same payment two ways and watch the clock.
  Bitcoin · One is a signed message that lands immediately; the other waits for the next block. Time is compressed and fees are described rather than quoted — an on-chain fee is whatever the auction says today.