Understanding Bitcoin - Stuntman Stoll 11-24-2013
There are plenty of articles and videos that try to explain bitcoin, but I don't think they do justice in showing the genius behind it so I'll give it a try.

For starters, let work with an analogy (that is original as far as I know). Think of a wall of safety deposit boxes (they are called addresses in bitcoin lingo). The face of each box is 4”x4” and has a glass door which a numbered key can open. Each box has a number label on the door that is different than the number that is on the key (but the number's are linked – they only work with each other [the address can be deduced from the key but not vise-versa). Each safety deposit box has has a slit in the door so that people can be given the number to the box, find it, put coins in the box (from their box), see how much money is in the box (remember, it has a glass door), but they can't do anything with the contents without the separate numbered key. The safety deposit boxes are instantly available to anyone in the world with an internet connection, and anyone can claim as many boxes as they want for free. There are no names on the boxes but it isn't completely anonymous because there is a ledger with all of the transactions between the safety deposit boxes. There are a LOT of safe deposit boxes. It is based on 256bit cryptography which means it takes a string of 256 0's and 1's to identify each key, and therefore each box. The number of combinations those 0's and 1's can be arranged in could be shown as 2^256, or about 1ee77 (ie. 1 with 77 zeros behind it). The size of the wall of safety deposit boxes (remember 4”x4”) would be 2ee34 miles square (or 3,700,000,000,000,000,000,000 light-years square or about 37 billion times the size of the known universe). That makes the odds virtually zero that anyone would accidentally (or purposely) stumble upon the key that is associated with your safety deposit box.

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