Crypto

A stablecoin issuer is a balance sheet: tokens are debts, reserves are assets, and the gap is the cushion. This guide reads reserve reports that way. It sets out what the GENIUS Act requires (permitted reserve assets, at least 1:1 backing, monthly examined reports, and audited financial statements for the largest issuers that are not already SEC filers), and explains why a point-in-time attestation is not an audit. It then rebuilds Circle's August 2026 USDC report and Tether's June 2026 report from the issuers' own figures, including how each one measures its token liabilities. Worked examples cover the coverage ratio, a frozen bank deposit, market-price moves and a hypothetical redemption run, and a checklist covers reading any reserve report.

Crypto has no FDIC or SIPC cover, and bitcoin's worst fall since 2016 was 84%: the facts to weigh first. The guide sets out what changes when the asset is crypto rather than a stock or a bank balance: holding a private key versus holding a claim on a platform, as the Celsius and FTX bankruptcy rulings showed; ten years of FRED price data on volatility and drawdowns; why the FBI's 2025 fraud figures matter when transfers are final; spreads, network fees and a worked break-even example; property tax treatment and the new Form 1099-DA; the SEC, CFTC and GENIUS Act picture as of October 2026; and what heirs would need to reach the coins.

A fork rewrites the rules every node checks, and only some forks leave holders with two coins instead of one. The difference comes down to whether the new rules tighten or loosen what counts as a valid block, and whether everyone running the network upgrades. Real cases show both outcomes: Bitcoin's SegWit and Taproot soft forks, Ethereum's scheduled upgrades, and the two splits that created Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Cash. The guide covers replay protection, why exchanges decide when you can touch forked coins, and how IRS Revenue Ruling 2019-24 taxes them, with a worked example of income, basis and a later sale.

When blocks fill up, a 60% jump in demand can lift the fee needed to get into the next block twentyfold. Bitcoin and Ethereum both sell a fixed amount of block space every few seconds or minutes, and congestion turns that space into an auction. The guide shows how Bitcoin users bid in satoshis per virtual byte and fix stuck payments with RBF or CPFP, how Ethereum's base fee climbs 12.5% per full block and is burned, and how blob fees price rollup data. Worked examples cover a 140 vB payment at different fee rates, a 21,000-gas transfer and a base fee path across 20 full blocks, along with the fee spikes of May 2023 and the April 2024 halving block.

A cold wallet stops remote key theft, but most crypto losses the FBI logged in 2025 were scams it can't stop. The guide starts with the mechanism: the seed and private keys are created and kept on a device that never hands them to an online computer, and only signatures leave it. It then goes threat by threat, from malware and exchange collapses that offline keys do defeat to seed photos, malicious token approvals, address poisoning, counterfeit devices, coercion, lost backups and stablecoin blocks that they do not. A breakdown of the FBI's 2025 crypto loss data, the trade-offs of a BIP 39 passphrase and 2-of-3 multisig, and a short pre-funding checklist follow.

A smart contract moves tokens exactly as coded, but it cannot see whether a parcel arrived or undo a mistake. This guide sorts what the code enforces by itself from what still depends on someone outside it: price feeds and other oracles, random numbers, upgrade keys held by an admin, and courts. It walks through a simple escrow line by line, prices an ordinary token transfer using gas figures measured on Ethereum in October 2026, and explains what verified source code, audits and US laws such as ESIGN and UCC Article 12 do and do not settle. It closes with the questions to ask before trusting money to one.

An NFT is a ledger entry linking a token ID to an owner address, not the artwork itself. This guide shows what the chain records, using a small simulated ledger of three tokens and one transfer. It then covers where the image and metadata usually live, why owning the token does not by itself give you the copyright, why creator royalties are voluntary unless a collection's contract enforces them, and how approvals and key custody decide who can actually move a token. A hypothetical sale with a 5% creator royalty and a 2.5% marketplace fee shows the arithmetic, and the closing checklist lists what to confirm before relying on an NFT record.

Three Bitcoin mining pools produced 62.9% of recent blocks, one measure of how decentralized it really is. A network can have thousands of nodes and still depend on a handful of pools, one client codebase, hosted RPC services or an issuer that can freeze tokens. This guide splits decentralization into layers, shows how to compute a Nakamoto coefficient and which threshold to use, and applies it to dated figures for Bitcoin mining pools, Bitcoin nodes and Ethereum staking, where two datasets that group entities differently give different answers. It also covers how the SEC's 2026 interpretation and the EU's MiCA regulation use the word, and ends with a checklist for testing any "decentralized" claim.

Most crypto trades settle on an exchange's own books, not the blockchain, which changes who holds your coins. A centralized crypto exchange usually performs jobs that US stock markets split across separate registered firms: taking orders, matching them, keeping custody and recording the result. This guide follows an account from identity checks to a trade, its fees and a withdrawal, using a worked example with round numbers to show which balances change inside the platform and which change on the blockchain. It also explains what a proof-of-reserves report can and cannot show, what the Celsius bankruptcy ruling and New York's custody guidance say about customer assets, and which questions to ask before moving money onto any platform.

If it makes the next block, a Bitcoin transaction takes about an hour on average to reach six confirmations. A crypto transaction passes through several separate states before it counts as settled, and each state means something different. This guide follows one transaction from signing and broadcast through node checks, the mempool, inclusion in a block, confirmations, reorg risk and finality, using Bitcoin developer documentation and Ethereum's own specifications. It works out, with a Poisson model, how long one, three and six blocks take to arrive and how wide the spread is, explains why the confirmation counts platforms demand are their own policies rather than protocol rules, covers when unmined transactions are dropped, and ends with a checklist for reading a block explorer entry.