The beauty in what Satoshi did was that he took several existing technologies (p2p, hashcash, public key cryptography, etc.), combined them and added only a sli

The beauty in what Satoshi did was that he took several existing technologies (p2p, hashcash, public key cryptography, etc.), combined them and added only a slight twist (how the consenus is achieved). In his white paper he only describes the twist, so you won't get a complete overview on how bitcoin works (even if you know how the stuff he's building on works). This link has been posted to HN before and gives a pretty good overview on how bitcoin works: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/ http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-a... So you won't get