Money, explained simply. Short explainers on the ideas the library uses. No jargon, no homework. Each one takes about two minutes.
Whatever a group of people agrees to trust. Shells, salt, gold, paper, numbers on a screen. The form changes; the agreement is the point.
Money has three jobs: a way to trade, a way to price things, and a way to store value over time. Dollars do the first two well. The third is the shaky one. New dollars get created every year, and every new dollar makes each existing dollar worth a little less. You felt it at the grocery store. That is not food getting more valuable. That is the dollar getting weaker.
So the real question behind "what is money?" is simpler: can you save in it? When the answer is "barely," people go looking for something that holds value better. For thousands of years, that was gold. In 2009, someone proposed a digital alternative. Which brings us to the next question.
Digital money that no government or company controls. It runs on a shared global ledger with a fixed supply. Only 21 million will ever exist, so unlike dollars, no one can print more.
People buy it for different reasons. Some treat it as "digital gold," a way to protect savings when currencies lose value. Others treat it as a high-risk investment and hope it keeps growing faster than everything else.
The honest part: it's volatile. Drops of 50% or more have happened several times, and they'll probably happen again. That's why the library keeps it outside the ranked stacks. It's a force of nature to understand, not a tip. If you ever buy any, keep it to money you could afford to lose, buy through a reputable exchange, and move it to your own wallet.
Lending money to a company, from your brokerage account. When you buy a bond or a preferred stock, you are the lender. The company pays you for the use of your money, as regular cash distributions. That payment is called yield. The plainest version is a Treasury bill: you lend to the US government and collect about 3.7% a year. Low pay for low risk. Lend to a single company instead, and it has to pay you more.
STRC is the library's working example. It is the ticker for "Stretch," a preferred stock issued by Strategy (the bitcoin treasury company) that pays a cash distribution every month. The rate floats with short-term interest rates, and right now it works out to roughly 12% a year.
"Preferred" is about the pecking order. If a company ever ran out of money, lenders get paid first, then preferred shareholders, then regular stockholders last. Preferred stock gives up most of the upside of owning the company in exchange for priority on payouts: steadier income, less drama. It's also perpetual: there's no maturity date, so the checks can keep coming indefinitely.
The honest part: the payout isn't guaranteed. The board declares it each month and can suspend it if the company hits trouble. The price can move too. It's designed to trade near its $100 par value, but it fell toward $70 during a market panic in June 2026 before recovering. Compare it to a Treasury bill at ~3.7%: that extra ~8% a year is the market's price for taking single-company credit risk. Higher income, real risk. That's the trade, every time.
One explainer at a time, written the same way: plain English, two minutes.
A basket of stocks you buy like one stock. Why most beginners should start here.
Price, day change, 52-week range: the only three numbers that matter at first.
Why the 12% growth bar is such a big deal: the math of money making money.
Why the library talks about price zones instead of price targets.