cross pond high tech

The value of Bitcoins – the peer-to-peer currency – has been soaring so much of late that you have certainly heard about it. It is also likely that you still don’t fully understand how this decentralized payment mechanism works in practice as it is hard to build a bridge between the overly general and the overly complicated descriptions of the system. Here is our (imperfect) take at it based on what we have read so far. The monetary economics of it is fairly straightforward and uninteresting, but the mechanics of making payments over a communications channel without a trusted party is really interesting.