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

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Update, 12/26/20: It's the year end holiday season, and Ars staff has been enjoying some much needed downtime. While that happens, we're resurfacing some classic Ars stories like this 2017 explainer on everything you've wanted to know about Bitcoin but may have been afraid to ask. (Because with the cryptocurrency's value reaching a new record high not even two weeks ago, it's perfectly reasonable to want the basic intel.) This piece first published on December 15, 2017 and it appears unchanged below.

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.

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