To understand Bitcoin's consensus mechanism and the concept of proof-of-work, we first have to understand Hashcash.
Merkle trees magically represent arbitrary amounts of data with a constant amount of space.
The most important building block for any cryptocurrency is the hash function.
We don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto was, where they came from, or where they are today. But here's what we do know.
"Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and we're going to write it." — The Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993