Huh, That's Cool

Hand-drawn explainers about things that turn out to be true.

Nobody Can Steal Satoshi's Bitcoin

Satoshi's million bitcoin sit in plain sight, behind a lock anyone may pick — for free, millions of tries a second, with no guard. It's the safest fortune ever, because guessing a 256-bit key isn't hard, it's thermodynamically impossible: merely counting that high would burn a billion Suns. Every real theft went around the lock; the one honest crack is quantum, aimed at the keys Satoshi left exposed. Making 2²⁵⁶ graspable.

How Scams Got Scary Good

The con got an AI upgrade — the broken English is gone, the voice is your daughter's, the login page is pixel-perfect. The advice you were raised on is quietly failing, and the only thing that still works is recognizing the shape of a scam. Our first interactive edition: four "spot the red flags" widgets walk you from hunting typos to reading the structure, ending on the bank call with no tell to find.

What Actually Happens When You Click a Link

You tap a link and a reply comes back in a blink. Follow it all the way down: shattered into packets, relayed hop by hop through your walls, your city, and a glass thread on the ocean floor, and home again — read by everyone who carries it, understood by none. How it arrives reliably, and how TLS keeps the letter sealed while the address stays visible.

Where Should Your Website Live?

Putting a website online is one ladder — from "type and click" at the top to owning your own data center at the bottom. Every rung down trades convenience for control, the cost curve flips, and almost everyone should stand higher than their ego wants to. The 37signals cloud-exit receipt, read honestly.

The Dinosaur in Your Fridge

The chicken isn't descended from dinosaurs and isn't like one — it is one, a living theropod from the same branch as T. rex, tamed from a wild jungle bird ~3,500 years ago. The skeleton evidence, the feathered tyrannosaurs, the "but then I'm a fish" objection answered honestly, and the 33 billion alive right now.

Why Rent Control Backfires

Capping the rent is the most natural idea in politics and the most tested idea in economics — and every test, on four continents, in both directions, says the cost doesn't shrink, it changes currency: queues, key money, decay, and higher rents for everyone at the door.

Self-Driving Cars Are Already Safer Than You

Human driving kills a fully loaded 737's worth of Americans every day and a half, and it never makes the news. The honest, fully-discounted case that being against self-driving cars is being for the plane.

How Big Is the Universe, Really?

Shrink the Earth to a Cheerio and walk outward until the trick breaks — the airliner that reaches the nearest star in 43 hours needs a century to cross the toy galaxy — and 54 million years to reach its edge. Then pour all of time into one calendar year, where dinosaurs appear on Christmas and your whole life is the last blink before midnight.