Quote from: Cataclysmic on August 13, 2012, 05:32:04 PM

Some of the things I want to understand better are:

How mining works
How open source works - specifically in relation to bitcoin
Statistics that I see on BlockChain.info

PS: I hope you all realize that the fact that I'm willing to pay for help understanding bitcoin is a sign it is VERY DIFFICULT for non-programmers to get their heads around bitcoin... I think this barrier to entry needs to be eliminated before bitcoin can really take off.

The average person uses paper money with no clue how the monetary system works, they just take it on a kind of collective trust. If there were enough people using bitcoin they would take bitcoin on collective trust too. Like a black box - I have X bitcoin, I send Y bitcoin, I receive Z bitcoin, etc... I'm not sure a person needs to know anything else, if they already trust bitcoin based on other people trusting it. Most people aren't that inquisitive.

The non-techie semi-early adopter, like yourself, is another matter. You want to know how it works for yourself, but are new to the things that make up bitcoin (cryptography, etc..).

Your questions seems straightforward, you could probably get them answered on here for free (and then other people can read them too):

"How open source works - specifically in relation to bitcoin"

Open Source - source code is released under a permissive license (you can do anything you want with it, you possibly have to give credit and/or release source code to modification); source code to bitcoin is available to download, the core developers have control over the main download location and control what goes into the main bitcoin client, but you could copy it, change it and put it up on another site if you wanted.

"How mining works"

Bitcoin transactions are collected in a series of blocks (the 'block chain'), each block requires a proof of an intensive calculation before the other clients accept it; Mining = people doing this calculation to get the 50 bitcoin 'block reward' as well as all the transaction fees in the block they 'mine'.

"Statistics that I see on BlockChain.info"

What statistic in particular?