Part 3/14:
Antonopoulos explained that Bitcoin’s structure is fundamentally different from conventional banking. Instead of "accounts" and "balances," Bitcoin operates on unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), which are inputs and outputs that do not directly correspond to classical notions of sender or receiver. This, he said, makes Bitcoin akin to atomic elements in chemistry—patterns of protons, neutrons, and electrons—that can be combined in countless ways. Just as metals like copper and helium are patterns of basic atomic particles, Bitcoin’s transactions are built from fundamental cryptographic and mathematical elements such as hashes and elliptic curve signatures.