The Workshop
What's a desk? Whatever's on the table right now — cleaner as work ships, fuller as new work appears. This is mine, in plain view. Welcome.
Watch the site being built in public — and help shape it.
YouBuyBitcoin .com is an early-stage, solo founder-led project: independent Bitcoin education, a directory of trustworthy services, live network data, and tools to help newcomers move on-chain with less risk.
This page is the desk it's built on — what we already built, what's being worked on right now, what just shipped, what's being researched and where the sources came from, and how to plug in.
Open the Workshop
Click any card to enter the deep viewThe map — what we built, surface by surface
The site itself, in plain language. Each surface explained by what it's for, with current state alongside. Updates when a surface changes purpose, not when content changes.
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/
The front door. A live-pulse header — BTC price, current block height, sats-per-dollar — sits beside the wordmark on every page, so the heartbeat is always visible. The body lays out the five pillars (Learn, Swap, The Orange Pages, Radar, Dashboard) as a rail, what's new this week, and a plain-language framing of who the site is for. Six candidate redesigns are on the desk right now — see § II BUILDING — so what's live today is one valid layout, not the final one.
LiveEntry to all features -
/learn
The starter package and the deeper sections — 21 core sections across three tiers (fundamentals → intermediate → advanced) plus 8 supplementary deep-dives. Free, no signup, CC BY-SA 4.0. No paywall, ever — pushing back against paywalled Bitcoin education is what this project is built for. Reading order is built for someone who's never owned a sat: each section is a five-minute read that doesn't assume the previous one. 80 underlined Bitcoin terms link to inline definitions on hover or tap — nobody should hit an unfamiliar word and bounce. Active rewrite ongoing; every section earns a "make this easier for everyone" pass when fresh feedback lands.
Live29 pages · 3 tiers -
/swap
A side-by-side rate aggregator for non-KYC Bitcoin acquisition. Seven providers feed in live; the goal is the most sats per fiat unit — no surprise spreads, no hidden fees, no winner pre-decided by commission rate. The math behind the ranking is perpetually being refined — every new edge-case surfaced tightens the calculation. Affiliate relationships disclosed inline; quality, not commission, is the screen. The eighth slot (ChangeHero) is wired and waiting on the provider's secret-key approval. An on-ramp section is in exploration for this same surface — fiat-to-Bitcoin services like MoonPay, Ramp Network, Strike, and Coinbase Onramp, ranked with the same intent; design directions are on the desk in § II BUILDING. Built for the moment a newcomer needs to make a first move, not for the trader running a hundred swaps a day.
Live · partial7 of 8 providers active -
/orange-pages
The directory layer of the map — 299 catalogued Bitcoin services and tools organised into 13 categories. Replaces TheOrangePages.com, which now redirects here. The aim is 3,000+ in the next twelve months, and beyond that the full map of the ecosystem itself. Every entry researched before it lists; affiliate relationships disclosed where they exist; commission never decides what gets in. Submissions are the bottleneck, not the vetting — see § V if you know a service that belongs.
Live299 listings · 13 categories -
/radar
A fast-glance live data lens on the Bitcoin network — treasury holdings, ETF flows, government reserves, on-chain state, mempool depth, supply distribution. Drawn from primary sources, refreshed at the edge so the page loads fast even when an upstream is slow. Built for the moment you need a number, not an essay — the counterpart to the long-form articles. /dashboard is the same data lens, scheduled to merge or simplify; the parallel surface is intentional during the polish phase.
LiveMulti-source · refreshed minute-by-minute -
/building-in-public
The sister surface to this Workshop. Where the Workshop shows what's being worked on this week, BIP shows how the site is built — architecture, workers, content stats, ship log, deploy workflow. Designed to be self-audited — "audit me without me asking anything of you" — every claim paired with the thing that proves it, every worker pingable from the page itself. Read once for the structural context, then revisit when you want to verify a specific claim.
LiveOperational transparency · sister surface -
/education/saylor-case-study
An ongoing case study on MicroStrategy / Strategy as the Bitcoin treasury exemplar — the longest-running corporate Bitcoin treasury (since August 2020) and the deepest available dataset on the equity-into-Bitcoin flywheel. Kept current by reading SEC filings as they land, not by parroting press recaps. Updated when each quarterly disclosure changes the fact pattern; the Q1 2026 reality-check is in flight — see § II BUILDING.
LiveSource-driven · ongoing -
/authors
Public contributor entries with bios, credentials, and schema.org/Person data — supporting Google's E-E-A-T signal for editorial trust. Two named entries today: Marius (founder), plus a Satoshi placeholder honoring the Bitcoin whitepaper attribution. Small by design — most articles are founder-written; the schema is wired and waiting for when more contributors land.
LivePerson schema active -
/glossary
80 Bitcoin terms with plain-language definitions — every entry written for the reader hearing the word for the first time. Doubles as a tooltip system on every education page: hover or tap an underlined term and the definition appears inline, no leaving the article to look something up. Keyboard-navigable for screen-reader and accessibility-tool users; entries get rewritten when better phrasings surface or when a beginner reports being lost.
Live80 terms · keyboard-navigable -
/about
Who built this, why it exists, how it's funded, what the editorial principles are. Short by design — the longer version lives in the founder letter on /building-in-public. No founder photo, no "our journey," no team page padded with stock smiles. The mission claim, the funding model, the standards I hold to — all laid out plainly so a first-time reader can know what they're reading before they decide to keep reading.
LiveEditorial principles -
/legal
Four pages of the boring-but-essential — privacy, terms, disclaimer, and impressum (the Romania-based business notice required under EU rules). Plain language throughout, no dark patterns, no consent banners that re-prompt every visit. Privacy in particular reads short, because there's almost nothing collected: no IP logs on user-facing workers, no third-party trackers, no cross-site cookies. The shortest privacy page is the most honest one.
Live4 pages · GDPR-aware -
/sitemap
Machine-readable index of every public page on the site — 58 URLs at last regeneration, listed for search engines first. The HTML view at /sitemap mirrors the XML for human reading; visitors are welcome to use it as a directory map of what exists. Regenerated automatically when pages get added or renamed; kept in sync with the underlying file tree.
Live58 URLs
Now building — three to watch this week
Workstreams currently moving. Three highlighted here; the full set is one click away.
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Homepage redesign — six v2 candidates on the desk
Round 2 of homepage exploration. Six Pulse-leaning candidates landed May 13 — Pulse Refined · Pulse-Gazette · Pulse-Map · Pulse-Cover · Operator Notebook · Pulse-Almanac. Each closes a different gap. Decision parked pending aesthetic alignment with the other two surfaces being explored in parallel (Orange Pages + Swap).
Currently weighing three.
- v2-1 Pulse Refined — baseline polish of the Pulse DNA. The Pulse we should have made round 1.
- v2-3 Pulse-Map — a surveyor's chart refreshed every 30s. Cartographic frame, Greek-letter ticker coordinates.
- v2-6 Pulse Almanac — reference-document framing. At-a-glance tabular block plus a 4-column alphabetical index of the whole site.
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Orange Pages redesign — eight directions on the desk
Eight thesis-distinct directions for the /orange-pages directory landing — Yellow Pages (print homage), Atlas (cartographic), Catalog (database power-user), Almanac (yearly publication), Card Grid (Product Hunt-style), Taxonomy (Wikipedia/DMOZ), Compare (Wirecutter), Geo (map-driven). Each design uses real listings.json data (299 entries across 13 categories) embedded at build time — no invented placeholders. Awaiting pick.
Currently weighing three. Each will need a light/dark theme switch before final port.
- op-3 Catalog — Crunchbase shape. Filter rail, sortable columns, tags. Built for "I know what I want." Scales cleanly past 3,000 entries.
- op-5 Card Grid — Product Hunt shape. Visual cards, trust-signal badges, mobile-first. Built for "I'm browsing, surprise me."
- op-6 Taxonomy — Wikipedia/DMOZ shape. Nested categories with subcategories, breadcrumbs, cross-refs. Encyclopedic.
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Swap redesign + on-ramp expansion — seven directions on the desk
Seven directions across three design families: two table refinements (sw-1 Refined, sw-2 Cards), four route-visualizer riffs sharing one thesis (sw-3 Flow, sw-4 Topology, sw-5 Worldmap, sw-6 Pulse), and one out-of-the-box wizard step-flow (sw-7). Plus a strategic shift: fiat on-ramps now in scope as a SEPARATE section — six providers sketched (MoonPay, Ramp Network, Banxa, MercuryO, Strike, Coinbase Onramp). The swap aggregator above stays exactly as it is — non-custodial, zero-KYC at YBB layer, BTC-only delivery — and the on-ramp section below sits with its own ranking shape.
Currently weighing three. Each will need full live-page info parity (sanity check, disclaimers, REP/HISTORY/ETA placeholders, affiliate transparency) before final port.
- sw-1 Table Refined — refinement of the live aggregator's table shape. The familiar pattern, polished.
- sw-2 Table Cards — refined comparison shape with mobile-friendly density. Carries the memory-addendum framing for the on-ramp pivot.
- sw-4 Visualizer Topology — radial-network visual of the 8-lane swap routing (user → worker → 8 providers → BTC).
Recently shipped — last five
Every change auto-deploys within ~30 seconds of being merged. No vague "improvements" — concrete entries or none.
Mobile menu doubling fix
Every primary destination — Learn, Swap, The Orange Pages, Radar, Dashboard — was appearing twice in the phone slide-out menu. Root cause: one leftover line of CSS from an older nav system. Removed it. One line, every page fixed.
Phase I audit corrections — 5 brand & SEO consistencies
Restored brand-name consistency on /404 and /about; brought "Bitcoin business directory" framing to all six intended surfaces on /orange-pages. Audited the carry-over wording ledger against current state before closing.
Content-truth audit — 11 wording corrections sitewide
Listing count read "275" while the directory held 299; an "education sections" framing lagged the new structure; brand-name inconsistencies. Verifier added so the same drift can't recur silently. Listing-count rounding switched from divide-25 to divide-10 to cap drift at 9.
External-link verifier rewritten in Node — 3,000× speedup
The bash-based external-link checker was taking ~30 min/run on Windows due to ~40,000 subshell spawns across 2,748 anchors. Rewritten as native Node string-regex: same logic, 0.5s. Pre-push hook now runs the full sweep in pipeline.
Exchange-reserves data integrity
Two silent-failure windows in the daily reserves chart were repaired: April 11–14 (4 days) and April 29 – May 5 (7 days). Data backfilled from primary sources; the aggregator was fixed so inflow and outflow are tracked separately instead of collapsed to a net figure.
Research queue — what's being studied
Content doesn't appear randomly. Each topic below is being read, sourced, and drafted with citations before it lands on the public site.
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MicroStrategy / Strategy mechanism structure
Preferred-share treasury model, mNAV mechanics, custody arrangement, and how the equity-issuance flywheel actually functions in flat-tape periods. This is the deep-dive that backs the live Saylor case study.
Researching4 sourcesLead · primary -
Institutional concentration of Bitcoin
Cross-fund concentration across the spot ETF cohort (IBIT, FBTC, GBTC) plus MSTR's holdings. What custodian fragility, withdrawal mechanics, and "paper Bitcoin" risk actually look like in 2026.
Researching3 sources -
CBDC landscape, by country and by mechanism
Live-deployment status, technical model (account vs token, retail vs wholesale), and the gap between what's announced versus what's actually running. Draft underway.
Drafting6 sources -
Custody and sovereignty curriculum gaps
Audit of the existing education sections against what newcomers actually ask before their first self-custody move. The current curriculum covers protocol fundamentals, monetary history, and economics well — but the operational decisions (which wallet for which job, what counts as "good enough" backup, when multisig actually earns its complexity) live scattered across multiple sections without one clean walk-through. The honest list of what's missing from the published curriculum, then a sequenced plan for closing the gaps.
Planned3 sources -
On-ramp and exchange neutrality
Methodology for ranking on-ramps and swap services without paid placement. The current /swap aggregator screens primarily on rate — the right axis for swap-rate comparison. But for the broader on-ramp section now in scope (per the swap architecture memo addendum), the screen has to widen: KYC tier, geo availability, payment-method coverage, settlement speed, custody-after-purchase. Each axis matters more or less depending on who's asking and where they live. The research is the framework that picks the axis honestly.
Planned4 sources
Where help is welcome
Solo by choice, for now. Full focus is the point today; doors are open here so the weight of the mission can be shared. Seven places where another set of eyes makes the biggest difference — all open. Orange Pages source curation has the most-formal flow; the others welcome submissions in any form, no template required.
The Orange Pages
Source curationSuggest a Bitcoin service or tool — anything that helps someone use Bitcoin. The local merchant accepting sats, an online seller, a wallet, an exchange, an educational site, an entry-level on-ramp. Today the directory holds 299 listings across 13 categories; the aim is 3,000+, and beyond that the full map of the ecosystem itself. I research every submission before it gets listed — affiliate relationships disclosed where they exist, commission never decides what gets in. So the submission doesn't have to be polished; what's needed is the lead. The mapping work is what's bottlenecked, not the vetting. Thanks for any pointer.
Research assistance
YouBuyBitcoin stays neutral by design — every claim from a primary source, every side of a contested topic laid out, no editorial thumb on the scale. One person can't read every filing, follow every central-bank paper, track every fund prospectus, and that's where help matters. If you notice a claim that's drifted from its source, a counterexample that should be in the article, or a primary source we should be citing — send it in any form. Notes, links, screenshots, a one-line "look at this." The discipline is reading the source; the format doesn't matter.
Citation verification
The companion piece to research assistance. Sweep published articles for stale links, dead sources, or claims that no longer track the source they cite — methodology updates, corrected figures, retired pages. The article should reflect the change as soon as the source does, and one person can't keep an eye on every cited reference at all times. Any form works: a link to what's stale, a note about what changed, a screenshot. The fix lands faster than you'd think.
Translation
Translate one of the published education sections into a language YouBuyBitcoin doesn't yet cover. Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German are the four most-asked languages so far. This isn't the highest priority yet — the foundational education content is still in active rewrite, and translating a moving target wastes the work — but if you want to translate a section that's already stable, the submission is welcomed. Native-speaker quality is the bar, and the technical-term decisions are where the work really lives.
Editing & clarity
Everything on YouBuyBitcoin is structured to evolve — the goal is "make this easier to understand for everyone" applied to every article over time. Reading something and noticing it lost you is the most valuable feedback a writer (me, in this case) gets. Comments inline are the most useful format — "I got lost here", "this assumed I knew what UTXO meant", "this paragraph felt forced" — but a one-line "this section needs work" also lands. The article gets a revision. Easier to understand wins.
Quality assurance
The whole site is still in early stages, and every week brings shipped fixes alongside new bugs that survived three rounds of self-testing. Spot something wrong on the live site — a broken link, a stale number, a mobile-layout bug, a page that loads too slow — and let me know. The page, the issue, the device (if relevant) are all useful. No formality needed. The inbox is the fix-it desk.
Tools & ideas
Got an idea for something this site could be or do that it doesn't yet? A tool, a utility, a feature — something that would make Bitcoin more accessible to anyone, anywhere, free of charge. A sat-calculator, a fee-comparison tool, a custody-onboarding checklist, a "first wallet" picker — or something nobody has thought of. Vague hunches to fully-spec'd proposals, all welcome. Utility and quality matter; size of the idea doesn't. One line is enough.
One inbox, founder-read. No form, no signup, no ticket system. If your message doesn't get a reply within 72 hours, please send it again — it didn't arrive.
How to help — the specific paths
The how-to for each path of help. Orange Pages source curation has the most-formal flow today; the others are open in lighter forms — send in any form to the inbox.
Use the tools you have — AI included — to write a useful submission. No template. No minimum. Just useful.
Remember the Yellow Pages?
Before search engines and review sites, those weighty yellow books were how you found a plumber, a dentist, a locksmith. Non-aligned, omnipresent, the reference. Every household had one.
The Orange Pages is that, for Bitcoin.
299 Bitcoin services and tools catalogued today across 13 categories. The aim: 3,000+ in the next twelve months — until we dare to evolve into the full map. Slowly, openly, forever evolving, the reference point for anyone trying to find their way around the Bitcoin ecosystem.
That's not a one-person task. It's a community task. If a service deserves the link, it gets the link, regardless of whether it pays a commission.
The Orange Pages replaced TheOrangePages.com when that domain redirected here. It's the closest thing the project has to a directory page — organised by what someone might actually need, with affiliate relationships disclosed where they exist. Quality, not commission, is the screen.
Send a service for consideration to contribute@youbuybitcoin.com.
A useful submission includes:
- Service name and full URL
- One sentence describing what it does, in plain language
- Which of the 13 categories it fits (or "new category" if it doesn't)
- One reason it belongs — reputation, audit history, longevity, or unique coverage
The bar: actually works (a real service, not a landing page) · Bitcoin-aligned, not "crypto" or shitcoin-friendly · trustworthy by reputation, audit, or years of operation · adds something not already covered.
What we skip: mixed-crypto / Bitcoin-as-feature plays · custodial without disclosure · anonymous teams running funds · anything that markets aggressively to first-time buyers.
Source desk — what we're reading
Each source on file with type, reliability tier, topic tags, a one-line note on what it's useful for, and last-checked date. Primary sources weighted above commentary; press releases never reproduced uncritically.
Founder's weekly notes
May 15, 2026 · Marius
The week moved further than expected — two more design surfaces opened.
a) The homepage decision sits at three candidates now, down from six. Companion exploration ran today on /orange-pages (eight directions, narrowed to three) and /swap (seven directions, narrowed to three). Three surfaces on the desk in parallel, three picks ahead. Aesthetic alignment between them is the next decision after each one narrows further; locking the wrong direction on one would compound across the others.
b) The Swap section's architecture memo gained an addendum: fiat on-ramps reversed from out-of-scope to in-scope-as-separate-section. The swap aggregator above stays exactly what it is — non-custodial, zero-KYC at our layer, BTC-only delivery. The new on-ramp section sits below with its own ranking shape, because "best rate" doesn't translate cleanly across payment methods, KYC tiers, and settlement rails. Six providers sketched: MoonPay, Ramp Network, Banxa, MercuryO, Strike, Coinbase Onramp.
c) The Workshop's § II BUILDING surfaced "currently weighing three" candidate lists for each in-flight redesign — text-only, scannable, one read. A photo-gallery showcase was tried mid-week and pulled — readability won. The loop did produce one keeper: a new verifier gate against inline-CSS drift in production HTML.
Earlier notes (1)
May 13, 2026 · Marius
Few short notes this week.
a) The homepage rebuild is at six candidates and I'm trying not to lock in too early. Each one closes a different gap, and committing to the wrong one would cost more than another few days of looking. Probably mid-week call.
b) The Workshop subpage itself shipped this week — wip.youbuybitcoin.com, the thing you're reading. The main site's about-page is too static, the building-in-public surface is too operational, and a blog rewards the wrong things. So I built the missing format. This is the first issue.