For beginners

Easy start for people without a strong technical background

http://gendal.me/2014/05/21/bitcoin-mining-the-first-technology-platform-that-works-because-it-goes-slow/

This post by Richard Brown explains the reason why bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are designed the way they are, starting from the very beginning of how you would design “digital money”. This article should be a very good starting point if you want a non-technical introduction to the world of bitcoin and distributed ledgers.

http://gendal.me/2015/04/27/how-to-explain-the-value-of-replicated-shared-ledgers-from-first-principles/

 

Easy start for people without a strong financial background

http://gendal.me/2015/07/05/a-simple-explanation-of-balance-sheets-dont-run-away-its-interesting-really/

http://gendal.me/2015/04/27/how-to-explain-the-value-of-replicated-shared-ledgers-from-first-principles/

A lot people without a financial background do not really understand the mental model that is a bank ledger, or really just how banks work in general. Coming from a computer scientist background, I only had a vague understanding of how the money and bank systems truly work. These two posts by Richard Brown gave me a good understanding of how banks track their assets and liabilities, and then how a replicated shared ledger can do the same, only more efficiently. This can be a good start if you want to truly understand how blockchain technology can help financial institutions.

 

Understanding Smart Contracts

A simple models for Smart Contracts (Richard Brown)