How the Bitcoin protocol actually works
Here's two dumb questions you might want to answer in a follow-up (and I encourage you to write more articles).<p>1. If it's a principle that "everybody" has a copy of the block chain, and the block chain records every transaction ever, isn't that going to be a storage problem? How big is one person's copy of the block chain now, and how many petabytes might it grow to be in a few years?<p>2. The way to spend a fractional coin is to have one input and two outputs, one back to yourself with the unspent change. But doesn't one's wallet begin to be cluttered with lots and lots of little fractional items? Like having a pocketful of small coins... So is there an automated way to every so often, do a many-small-input, one-big-output payment to yourself to consolidate the change?