Bitcoin Explained in Five Minutes

David Andolfatto, VP of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis offers a slide deck providing an easy-to-read overview of what Bitcoin is, how it works, and how it compares to old-fashioned currency [PDF] (from a central banker's perspective, remember) in terms of intrinsic value, security, and price stability. Andolfatto includes references to the Mt. Gox meltdown and to the recent IRS ruling that Bitcoin is property rather than currency; also, he's got jokes on the second slide (for the benefit of techies) and second-to-last slide (for the benefit of bankers). I think he's wrong about the size of the Bitcoin source code, though - he says it's 17 MB, but from a quick google search it doesn't look all that big .

[Ed. note: This is timely given how much Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and similar have been in the news recently. What does Pipedot think? Is cryptocurrency a passing fad, or the first chink in the armor of government regulated currencies?]