Dean
Latest posts by Dean (see all)

When beginners first start using Bitcoin there is often a great deal of curiosity about how it actually works. Some people will have a hard time trusting it to work at all because they don’t really understand it – after all the idea that you can have money without banks or government agencies running the show is pretty radical.

Explaining how to use Bitcoin, and why you should use it, is fortunately pretty easy now that there are some great beginner friendly wallets and services out there. But explaining the technical principles of how it all works and how it keeps your wealth secure is a little bit more complicated. Most explanations that I’ve seen either give an oversimplified and vague summary that isn’t particularly accurate, or a complicated technical introduction that is more suitable for a computer scientist than an ordinary member of the public.

So I was really pleased to find this video which offers a fairly comprehensive technical overview of how Bitcoin works ‘under the hood’ in a way that most people should be able to follow pretty easily. Its a little but dated already, having been made over 2 years ago, and that does show in places, but all of the important stuff is 100% accurate and relevant still. It covers everything from an introduction to the maths, how addresses and wallets work and what actually happens when you create a transaction, to an extended discussion about how fraudulent ‘double spending’ transactions are prevented, and also explains some more advanced features like multi-signature transactions