Picture this. It’s 2013. A guy named Laszlo pays 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. At the time, that felt fine — Bitcoin was worth fractions of a cent and nobody really knew what it was. Fast forward to today, and those same 10,000 bitcoins would be worth somewhere in the ballpark of $600 million US dollars — or roughly A$900 million for anyone looking at the bitcoin price in AUD.
That pizza story is either the funniest or the most painful story in financial history, depending on how you look at it. But it also tells you everything you need to know about what cryptocurrency is and why people are obsessed with it.
This article is for you if you’ve heard people talk about Bitcoin, if you’ve seen headlines about the bitcoin stock to flow model, or if you’ve wondered whether Bitcoin is actually traded on the stock market. Maybe you’ve thought about becoming a cryptocurrency trader, or you’ve even asked yourself: could I actually learn how to make a cryptocurrency of my own one day?
All of those questions get answered here. No jargon. No complicated finance speak. Just a story that walks you through the world of crypto from the very beginning — and gives you the foundation to understand what’s happening in one of the most exciting and unpredictable financial markets in the world.
Let’s start at the very beginning.
Chapter One: What Even Is Cryptocurrency?
Imagine you go to the supermarket and pay with cash. Those notes and coins in your wallet — whether they’re dollars, pounds, euros, or rupees — are what we call fiat currency. It’s physical, it’s government-issued, and it’s been the way humans have traded value for centuries.
Cryptocurrency is something completely different.
It has no physical form. You can’t hold it, fold it, or put it under your mattress. It exists purely as digital information — a series of numbers secured by some seriously advanced mathematics. And that word “crypto” in cryptocurrency? That stands for cryptography, which is essentially the science of encrypting and protecting information so that only the right person can access it.
In other words, your cryptocurrency is locked behind a digital key that only you possess. No bank is involved. No government controls it. The only person who can access your money is you.
This might sound a little unsettling at first. We’re all used to the idea that a bank holds our money safely, and if something goes wrong, we can call customer service. With crypto, there is no customer service. There’s no bank. Instead, there’s something called the blockchain — and that’s where the magic happens.
Chapter Two: The Blockchain — The World’s Most Honest Record Book
Think of the blockchain like a giant notebook that everyone in the world can see, but nobody can secretly erase or edit.
Every time someone sends cryptocurrency to someone else, that transaction gets written into this notebook. When one page fills up — called a block — it gets sealed, stamped, and linked to the page before it. Then a brand new page opens up. That chain of linked pages is the blockchain.
Here’s what makes this so powerful: because thousands of computers around the world are all keeping a copy of this notebook at the same time, there’s no single point of failure. No single person or company controls it. You can’t hack it because you’d have to hack thousands of computers simultaneously — and the Bitcoin network alone has so much computational power behind it that this is essentially impossible.
Every major cryptocurrency has its own blockchain. Bitcoin has one. Ethereum has one. Cardano, Solana, Binance — they all have their own. Think of each blockchain like a separate bank, except instead of one building on a city corner, it’s spread across thousands of computers worldwide.
Chapter Three: Your Keys to the Kingdom — Private and Public Keys
When you open a crypto wallet to store your cryptocurrency, you get two things: a private key and a public key.
Think of your public key like your home address. You can give it to anyone. If someone wants to send you Bitcoin or any other crypto, they just need your public key — a long string of letters and numbers — and they can send the money directly to your wallet.
Your private key, on the other hand, is the actual key to your front door. It unlocks your wallet and gives access to your funds. When you first create a wallet, you’ll typically be given a 12-word seed phrase — a random set of words that, in the correct order, can recover your wallet from anywhere in the world.
Write it down. Store it somewhere only you know. Never, ever share it.
This is critical: if you go into any cryptocurrency forum or group online, there will be scammers actively trying to steal your private key. No legitimate person, platform, or business will ever need your private key. Not one. If someone asks for it, they are trying to steal everything you have.
Chapter Four: Bitcoin — Why the First Is Still the Biggest
Bitcoin was the original. It launched in 2009 by an anonymous creator known as Satoshi Nakamoto, and it remains the largest and most valuable cryptocurrency in the world. Every other cryptocurrency — Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, and the other 13,000+ coins — is known as an altcoin.
So why is Bitcoin so valuable? The answer is scarcity.
There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins in existence. That’s it. No more can be created. New coins slowly drip into circulation roughly every 10 minutes through a process called mining — but the total amount is mathematically capped. As of today, around 19 million have already been mined, and the last Bitcoin won’t be produced until the year 2140.
Compare this to regular money, where governments can simply print more whenever they want, diluting the value of everyone else’s savings. Bitcoin can’t be inflated that way. This is why people often call it digital gold — just like physical gold is valuable because there’s a limited supply, Bitcoin is valuable because there’s a limited supply, and demand keeps growing.
Eight years ago, one Bitcoin was worth a few dollars. Today it trades in the tens of thousands of dollars. In AUD, the bitcoin price in AUD at the time of writing sits around A$86,000–A$97,000, depending on the day, with some forecasts projecting the AUD price could reach anywhere from A$140,000 to A$355,000 over the next couple of years.
That’s the power of scarcity meeting growing demand.
Chapter Five: Is Bitcoin on the Stock Market?
This is one of the most common questions beginners ask: is Bitcoin on the stock market?
The short answer is: not directly — but you can get pretty close.
Bitcoin itself is not a company, so it doesn’t have a stock ticker the way Apple or Tesla does. It trades on cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken — platforms that operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no closing bell.
However, there are now ways to get Bitcoin exposure through traditional stock markets:
Spot Bitcoin ETFs — Exchange-Traded Funds that track Bitcoin’s price — launched in the United States in early 2024 and quickly became one of the fastest-growing financial products in history. These trade on regular stock exchanges, meaning anyone with a standard brokerage account can now gain Bitcoin exposure without ever touching a crypto wallet.
You can also invest in companies that hold large amounts of Bitcoin on their balance sheets, like MicroStrategy, which trades like a leveraged bet on Bitcoin’s price.
So while Bitcoin itself isn’t technically “on the stock market,” the lines between the crypto world and the traditional financial world are blurring faster than most people expected.
Chapter Six: The Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow Model — The Prediction Tool That Went Viral
If you’ve spent any time in crypto communities, you’ve probably heard someone mention the bitcoin stock to flow model. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually a beautiful, simple idea.
Stock-to-flow was a concept originally used for physical commodities like gold and silver. The formula is straightforward: take the total existing supply of an asset (the “stock”), divide it by how much new supply enters the market each year (the “flow”), and you get a ratio that measures how scarce something is.
A high stock-to-flow ratio means the asset is very scarce — which historically tends to mean high value.
Bitcoin’s stock-to-flow ratio increases over time because of something called the halving. Roughly every four years, the reward that miners receive for processing transactions is cut in half — meaning the rate of new Bitcoin entering circulation gets halved. After the most recent halving in 2024, the flow of new Bitcoin dropped significantly, pushing the stock-to-flow ratio higher than ever.
A popular analyst known as PlanB took this model and applied it to Bitcoin’s price history. The results were striking — Bitcoin’s price has historically tracked very closely with what the stock-to-flow model predicted. Based on the current ratio after the 2024 halving, the model suggests Bitcoin’s price should trade between $65,000 and $524,000 over the next four years.
Does that mean it will? Not necessarily. Models are tools, not crystal balls. But the stock-to-flow model has given millions of investors a framework for thinking about Bitcoin’s long-term value — and it’s hard to argue with the underlying logic of scarcity.
Chapter Seven: What Is the Bitcoin Price Future? (What Experts Are Saying)
Nobody knows exactly where the bitcoin price future is headed — anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or selling something. But there are some thoughtful, well-researched forecasts worth understanding.
For 2026, analyst predictions range from a conservative low around $68,000 to bullish targets of $200,000–$318,000, depending on factors like institutional demand, ETF inflows, and macroeconomic conditions.
Looking further ahead, some of the most respected names in finance have made bold long-term calls. Standard Chartered’s analyst publicly revised their forecast upward after underestimating earlier price moves. ARK Invest has done detailed modelling suggesting this cycle could diverge from historical patterns due to the new role of ETFs and corporate Bitcoin adoption.
The key drivers that analysts point to again and again are:
Supply tightening — With the halving complete and nearly 95% of all Bitcoin already mined, the available supply is shrinking. Meanwhile, an estimated 3–4 million coins are permanently lost forever, making the real circulating supply even smaller.
Institutional demand — Major companies, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds are increasingly buying Bitcoin as a long-term store of value.
ETF inflows — Spot Bitcoin ETFs have absorbed enormous amounts of supply since their launch, creating sustained demand pressure.
Macroeconomic uncertainty — Bitcoin is increasingly seen as a hedge against inflation, currency debasement, and geopolitical instability.
The long-range forecasts get even more dramatic: some serious analysts project Bitcoin could reach $250,000–$350,000 by 2030. VanEck has published a long-term model projecting prices above $1 million in the decades ahead.
These are speculative forecasts, not guarantees. But the direction — driven by simple supply and demand — seems hard to argue with.
Chapter Eight: How to Become a Cryptocurrency Trader
So you’ve decided you want to get involved. You want to be a cryptocurrency trader. Where do you even start?
There are actually several different types of trading in crypto, and understanding the difference matters a lot.
Investing / HODLing is the simplest. You buy Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, and you hold it for months or years — through the ups and the downs — because you believe the long-term price will be much higher. The word HODL actually came from a famous typo on a forum — someone meant to write “hold” but typed “hodl” — and it became slang for “Hold On for Dear Life.” It’s become a whole philosophy in crypto culture.
Swing trading is a medium-term approach. You buy when the price drops to a support level and sell when it rises to a resistance level. Then you repeat the process, slowly accumulating more of the cryptocurrency over time.
Short-term trading spans a few days to a few weeks. You identify a catalyst — an upcoming product launch, a major exchange listing, a regulatory announcement — and you position yourself to benefit from the price movement it causes.
Day trading is the most intense form: you buy and sell within a single day, sometimes within hours. It requires deep knowledge of technical analysis — reading chart patterns, volume indicators, and price action to make rapid decisions.
Whichever approach you choose, a few principles apply to all of them: never invest more than you can afford to lose, always have a plan for when to exit, and pay attention to volume — the amount of money flowing in and out of a cryptocurrency. High volume confirms price moves; low volume can signal false breakouts.
One more concept worth understanding is altcoin season. Money in crypto tends to flow in a predictable cycle. First, it flows into Bitcoin. Bitcoin rises. Then some of that money spills over into altcoins, which start rising faster. When altcoins are outperforming Bitcoin, that’s known as “altcoin season.” Smart traders watch this cycle and position accordingly — buying altcoins during Bitcoin season, and switching back to Bitcoin when altcoin season peaks.
Chapter Nine: Gas, Stablecoins, and Parking Your Profits
Two more concepts every cryptocurrency trader needs to understand: gas fees and stablecoins.
Gas is simply the transaction fee you pay when you move cryptocurrency on a blockchain. On the Ethereum network, for example, sending someone Ethereum might cost you anywhere from $5 to $50 in gas, depending on how busy the network is. That fee goes to the people who are doing the computational work of processing your transaction — the miners or validators.
The lesson here is simple: don’t send small amounts of crypto during busy periods. The fee could eat up a significant chunk of your transaction.
Stablecoins are one of the smartest tools in a trader’s arsenal. These are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a fixed value — usually $1 US. Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), and Binance USD are the most commonly used ones.
Here’s why they matter: when you make a profit — say you bought Bitcoin at $30,000 and it’s now at $60,000 — you can sell your Bitcoin and move the proceeds into Tether. Your $60,000 is now frozen at exactly $60,000, with no volatility. If the market then drops 30%, you’ve protected your gains and you can rebuy at a lower price.
Stablecoins are how experienced traders “park” their profits without having to cash out back to fiat currency. And the numbers show just how central they are to the market — at any given time, Tether alone often trades with more 24-hour volume than Bitcoin itself.
Chapter Ten: How to Make a Cryptocurrency
Here’s the question that surprises most people: creating a cryptocurrency token is actually not as complicated as you might think.
How to make a cryptocurrency at a basic level involves a few key steps:
Step 1 — Choose your blockchain. Most new tokens are built on top of Ethereum, which was specifically designed to allow developers to build applications and currencies on it. Ethereum is like an operating system — just as Windows lets you run programs on your computer, Ethereum lets developers run financial applications on its blockchain. Solana and Binance Smart Chain are other popular choices.
Step 2 — Write a smart contract. A smart contract is simply a program that lives on the blockchain. It contains the rules for your token: how many exist, what they’re called, how they can be transferred. Ethereum uses a standard called ERC-20 for tokens, and there are ready-made templates that make this much more accessible than it sounds.
Step 3 — Deploy it. Using developer tools like Remix IDE or Hardhat, you push your smart contract onto the blockchain. This costs a small amount of gas.
Step 4 — Add liquidity. To allow people to buy and sell your token, you typically add it to a decentralised exchange like Uniswap, pairing it with Ethereum or another established currency so there’s a market for trading it.
Step 5 — Build something real. This is the hard part, and it’s where most tokens fail. A token without a genuine use case or a real community behind it is just a number on a screen. The tokens that survive and grow are the ones solving real problems or building real communities.
Creating a cryptocurrency is one thing. Building one that means something is an entirely different challenge.
Summary: What You Need to Remember
You’ve just absorbed more about cryptocurrency than most people will ever bother to learn. Here’s the short version of everything covered:
Cryptocurrency is digital money secured by cryptography and stored on a blockchain — a public, decentralised record of transactions that no single person controls.
Bitcoin is the original and most valuable cryptocurrency, worth tens of thousands of dollars and climbing. Its value is driven by a hard cap of 21 million coins — scarcity that only increases over time.
Bitcoin on the stock market isn’t direct, but Bitcoin ETFs now allow traditional investors to gain exposure without ever using a crypto exchange.
The bitcoin stock to flow model measures Bitcoin’s scarcity and has historically been a useful — if imperfect — guide to long-term price direction.
The bitcoin price future is the subject of huge debate, with credible forecasts ranging from $100,000 to over $300,000 for the current cycle, and much higher over the long run.
The bitcoin price in AUD currently sits around A$86,000–A$97,000, with long-range forecasts projecting it could reach A$140,000–A$355,000 in 2026 if USD forecasts materialise.
Becoming a cryptocurrency trader means choosing your style — HODLing, swing trading, or day trading — and learning to manage risk, read volume, and understand market cycles.
How to make a cryptocurrency starts with writing a smart contract on a blockchain like Ethereum — technically accessible, but commercially successful only when backed by genuine utility.
The world of cryptocurrency is volatile, fast-moving, and genuinely exciting. It has made millionaires and it has wiped people out. The difference between those two outcomes almost always comes down to one thing: knowledge.
You’ve now got the foundation. What you do with it is entirely up to you.
⚠️ Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risk. Always do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.
