Good long read from Arstechnica... Bitcoin primer

Want to really understand how bitcoin works? Here’s a gentle primer

Ars goes deep on the breakthrough online payment network.

Timothy B. Lee - 12/15/2017, 12:35 PM

The soaring price of bitcoin—the virtual currency is now worth more than $250 billion—has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks. But the real significance of bitcoin isn't just its rising value. It's the technological breakthrough that allowed the network to exist in the first place.

Bitcoin's still anonymous inventor, who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, figured out a completely new way for a decentralized network to reach a consensus about a shared transaction ledger. This innovation made possible the kind of fully decentralized electronic payment systems that cypherpunks had dreamed about for decades.

Continue reading here:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/how-bitcoin-works/