I would start you off with this: Bitcoin is an autonomous software program. It waits for help, and relies on the help of humans, but it can't be pushed around.

I would start you off with this: Bitcoin is an autonomous software program. It waits for help, and relies on the help of humans, but it can't be pushed around. It either works or it waits. What Bitcoin does, specifically, is maintain a ledger. That's all. Very useful, but quite limited. It tracks accounts, and which accounts transfer where. No more, no less. That simplicity made it somewhat tractable to implement, in a world where no one had ever heard of an autonomous software application before. It was the "Hello World" of autonomous software. Computer scientists were mostly blindsided by this. At least I was. But Bitcoin's success, even in its earliest forms, suggested that there would be a whole wealth of autonomous software coming. We were excited. A whole new way of thinking about software, where you don't write procedures, you write contracts. It was easy enough to see that you could store arbitrary information in the Bitcoin ledger... a few kilobytes, maybe a GIF. But performance was awful. So an autonomous data hosting service was certainly on the menu, for whoever could figure out a set of contracts that would scale. But it also seemed like an autonomous application hosting service was also possible. And whoever built it would be holding the keys to another Bitcoin-style explosion of value. Think of it like this: someone had invented autonomous Visa, the race was on to invent the autonomous Heroku. MaidSafe was one attempt. Ethereum was another. I don't have any reading materials for you. This is a brand new area of inquiry. Academia doesn't seem to have taken notice yet, and the AltCoin scene is just a bunch of finance people gathering around cargo cults. I guess what I would suggest: read up on MaidSafe and Ethereum. The Ethereum blog is fascinating. Start at the beginning. Try to understand what's happening and then ask questions. Don't rely on other peoples' characterizations of these systems, try to understand how and why they work. Or, if you want to trust someone, trust me: Ethereum is currently the best contender we have. Just learn how to make dapps and start looking for good business opportunities within that ecosystem.