钱往哪走

In the previous lesson, we broke down what’s in your account: crypto, stablecoins, and a small amount for fees. But these things don’t just appear in your account out of nowhere—they’re either bought with money from your bank card or transferred from somewhere else. This lesson is about how money and crypto move in and out: deposits and withdrawals.
Let’s start with deposits—that is, putting money into your exchange account. There are two common ways to do this.
The first way is to buy crypto directly with your local currency. There’s a formal term for local currency: fiat currency. It means the official currency issued by a country, such as the Chinese yuan, the US dollar, or the Japanese yen. When you buy crypto with fiat currency on a platform, you’re often not dealing with the exchange itself, but with a third-party payment provider or a merchant it works with. You pay in yuan as instructed on the page, and the other party transfers the crypto to your account. This is the most straightforward option for beginners, since you don’t need to know about wallets or addresses first.

① What is its issuance mechanism?
Many people think Solana’s coins are issued in batches according to a schedule by some institution, but that’s not the case at all. $SOL New coins come from an issuance rule written into the protocol: the network continuously creates new coins according to a set schedule, and distributes them to validators who participate in producing blocks. Validators are essentially server operators who help the entire network keep records and package transactions. They must first stake their own SOL to be eligible to participate in consensus and take turns producing blocks. The more they stake and the more reliably they perform, the greater their chances of being selected to produce a block—and the more newly issued rewards they can earn. Solana also has a design called PoH (Proof of History), which timestamps transactions in a verifiable way, giving the entire network a consistent ordering of “who came first” and speeding up block production. One point that’s easy to confuse: PoH is a timing and ordering mechanism, not a separate type of consensus. Staking is still what determines who produces blocks. As for whether “your holdings increase on their own,” the answer is no—if you leave your coins sitting in a wallet, the amount won’t increase at all. Only by delegating your coins to participate in block production can you potentially receive a share of newly issued coins.

In the last lesson, we explained the difference between centralized and decentralized exchanges. But whichever kind you use, the first thing you do after opening an account on a centralized platform is put money into it. So what exactly does the account hold, and what does each thing do?
Let’s start with registration. To sign up on a platform like Binance, you’ll need an email address or phone number, and then you’ll have to verify your identity—that means uploading a photo of your ID card or passport and completing a facial recognition check on camera. The goal is to prove that the person behind the screen is really you, and that someone else isn’t using your information to open an account. This isn’t the platform making you jump through hoops for fun: regulators in many regions require trading platforms to verify users’ identities. Accounts that haven’t been verified usually can’t withdraw funds and may have limits.

① What is its issuance mechanism?
First, let’s be clear about what it isn’t: $ETH it doesn’t rely on mining rigs solving puzzles to compete for the right to record transactions, nor does whoever gets there first automatically win. Before September 2022, Ethereum did produce blocks using calculations performed by graphics cards and specialized mining machines, just like Bitcoin. After that, it switched to a set of rules called “proof of stake,” abbreviated PoS. Put simply: to qualify to produce a block, you first stake some of your own coins as collateral. The system then selects someone from among those who have staked coins to record transactions, and rewards them with some newly issued coins.

① What is its issuance mechanism?
Let’s start with the number 1,000: to become a “masternode” on the Dash network, you need to put up 1,000 $DASH as collateral. New Dash coins don’t appear out of thin air; they’re generated through two activities at once. On one side, miners use the X11 algorithm (a mining method designed specifically for Dash) to produce new blocks. On the other, masternodes that have put up 1,000 coins provide services to the network, such as transaction processing and coin mixing. Whenever a new block is produced, the newly issued coins are distributed between these two groups, while another portion goes into the network’s own budget pool to fund development and promotion. The official documentation states that 20% of the block reward goes to the budget, with the remaining 80% distributed between miners and masternodes. Different sources present the exact split of that 80% differently; I haven’t checked them line by line, so I won’t draw a firm conclusion on that point for now.

Which network does a cross-chain bridge actually move your coins to? To understand this, you need to go through an on-chain transfer yourself, because at its core, cross-chain activity is still a series of ordinary transfers passing the funds along behind the scenes.
Many people assume that when withdrawing crypto for the first time, all that matters is getting the address right. This is the easiest thing to get wrong in this lesson. The same asset often has versions on multiple networks. Their addresses may look alike, but the ledgers behind them are completely different. If you select the wrong network, the coins do arrive on-chain—but they end up on a ledger your wallet can’t access.
Here’s a concrete example. You withdraw 1,000 $USDT from an exchange and casually select Ethereum from the network dropdown, but your wallet address actually belongs to the TRON network. The funds will be recorded on the Ethereum ledger—they’ll be visible on-chain, and the balance will be there. But your wallet only recognizes the TRON network, so it will show a zero balance: you won’t be able to see or spend the funds. Recovering them usually requires finding another way to import the private key or seed phrase for the corresponding network, and in many cases, that’s simply not possible. So the first step in a transfer isn’t entering the address. It’s confirming “which network does this coin use?” and then confirming “which network does my receiving address belong to?” Proceed only when the two match.

① What is its issuance mechanism?
Imagine the issuance process of $ZEC as an everyday scene: it’s like a group of people racing to solve a math problem. Whoever finds the answer first gets the newly issued coins for that round. This is what’s known as mining. Zcash uses the Equihash algorithm. Miners use graphics cards or specialized mining machines to perform calculations over and over. When they find a result that meets the rules, they can create a new block, which comes with a block reward. That reward is where new coins come from. There’s no central authority issuing coins according to a schedule; new coins can only be created through this computational process, and the total supply is capped at 21 million.

Hot wallets are certainly convenient to use—you can receive and send payments with just a few taps on your phone. But many people get stuck the first time they try to withdraw crypto from an exchange: even though they entered the address exactly right, the funds still don’t arrive. To understand where things go wrong, you first need to know one thing: every blockchain is a separate ledger.
Here’s the bottom line: Ethereum is one ledger, and BSC is another. BSC stands for Binance Smart Chain, a blockchain with a structure similar to Ethereum’s, but with much lower fees. Each ledger keeps its own records, and the two don’t communicate with each other. If you have 100 USDT recorded on the Ethereum ledger, you won’t find that record on the BSC ledger—even if the two addresses look exactly the same. Similar-looking addresses don’t mean they belong to the same system.

① What is its issuance mechanism?
Where do Kaspa’s new coins actually come from, and who decides how many there are? The answer isn’t that some company issues them according to a plan. Instead, machines around the world continually work on a never-ending math problem. This mechanism is called proof of work, or PoW for short. Bitcoin uses the same kind of approach: whoever’s machine first finds a number that meets the requirements gets to bundle a new batch of transaction records into a block and, in return, receives newly created coins. In other words, new coins aren’t printed by someone—they’re earned through computing power.

This course has 42 lectures, presented in order, at a pace of one lecture per day. Below is the complete list of lectures covered so far (Lectures 1–10), grouped by unit so you can easily find them all in one place.
【Understanding Blockchain】
Lecture 01 What Exactly Is Blockchain?
Lecture 02 How Bitcoin Came to Be
Lecture 03 Who Keeps the Ledger: Mining and Consensus
Lecture 04 What Exactly Does “On-Chain” Mean?
Lecture 05 The Debate Over Bitcoin’s Value
【Assets and Wallets】
Lecture 06 What’s the Difference Between Coins and Tokens?
Lecture 07 Why Are Stablecoins Stable?
Lecture 08 Private Keys, Public Keys, and Addresses