COURSE 2 - 1.1. What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is two things:
digital, yet absolutely scarce, property (for some, bitcoin is also a form of money, though this claim would require to address Mises' regression theorem): in this case, it's "bitcoin", with lower case "b";
A decentralized, trustless, peer-to-peer, open-source, censorship-resistant financial network: "Bitcoin" with an uppercase "B".
In the Bitcoin protocol are codified:
the first law of monetary economics (any quantity of money is optimal for any economy as long as it's fixed and sufficiently divisible): the bitcoin supply is fixed (21 mln btc). Therefore, the entire marginal, subjective value theory (from which the previous law derives and on which the entire structure of economic theory rests) is codified into Bitcoin.
the principle of equality before the law, on which the entire structure of non-arbitrary law (the non-aggression principle), and therefore freedom, rest: no node or miner is privileged.