Understanding Bitcoins: a Series – Edoardo Barp

So what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a decentralised currency, in which (nearly) all of the information is shared through a network composed of anyone with a computer who wishes to join, and built in such a way and with such rules that everything is secure while simultaneously being shared, privacy-friendly while simultaneously being public, and many more such apparently paradoxical properties. Those are nice words and all, but how exactly does it all work? How do I know if someone paid me? What does it even mean to own BTCs? These are the type of questions which confused me and prompted me to do further research.

Therefore, a few weeks ago I decided I would read through Satoshi’s whitepaper, navigate the sea of articles, forum posts, explanations, and read source code from the various implementations, to finally get a proper understanding of the inner workings of the bitcoin so that you don’t have to (well, mainly to finally be satisfied myself, but that’s a side note).

Throughout this quest, I have found BTCs, and more generally the whole underlying blockchain concept, to be a lot more complicated than all of these vague articles make it be. I was continuously baffled by the small details and problems which I had not even imagined before, and by how they were solved. Therefore, I intend on trying to share this knowledge in this series, so that you can have a better, more in-depth grasp, of what exactly is going on, and also see the weirdness and peculiarities which metaphors tend to hide so well.