7 Biggest Bitcoin Myths, Explained

Bitcoin attracts more confident misinformation than almost any subject in technology. Most of the biggest Bitcoin myths come from mixing up the network itself with the companies around it, or from facts that were true in 2013 and are not now. Here are seven of them, a line each, with what is actually the case.

Seven things people get wrong

"Bitcoin is anonymous." It is close to the opposite: every payment is public forever. Names are not attached, but addresses are, and whole firms exist to link the two.
"It is mainly used by criminals." A permanent public ledger is a poor place to hide. Investigators have traced and seized coins years after the fact, which cash never allows.
"You have to buy a whole one." Each bitcoin divides into 100 million satoshis, so a few dollars' worth is perfectly normal.
"Bitcoin has been hacked." Exchanges and individuals have been robbed many times. The network's own record has never been rewritten.
"Anyone could copy the code and make another Bitcoin." People have - Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and hundreds more. Copying the software is easy; copying fifteen years of users and computing power is not.
"Mining is pure waste." Mining does consume a great deal of electricity, and that is a fair thing to argue about. What is not true is that the energy buys nothing: it is exactly what makes rewriting the record too expensive to attempt.
"Support can reset my password." There is no support. If you hold your own coins and lose the recovery words, nobody on earth can return them.

Which myth costs people the most?

The privacy one. People assume bitcoin is untraceable, post an address publicly, then wonder how a stranger knows their balance - it is on the record, and anyone can look it up in a block explorer in seconds. If you want a payment that is not tied to the rest of your history, use a fresh address for it. Wallets generate new ones for nothing.

The honest summary: Bitcoin is public, slow by design and unforgiving about lost keys, and none of that is a flaw it is hiding. Next: how Bitcoin actually works and the slang around it.