...
John Nash's Ideal Money stated that to bring about ideal money it would have to be done evolutionarily in an incremental and naturally viral fashion. If you understand game theory, you would understand why the elite can't just announce a new monetary system and expect to not be attacked and undermined.
... Because viral things don't stop growing due to naysayers. The more naysayers, the more a viral thing spreads.
Chapter 6
Why Bitcoin Is a Big Deal in the book
Bitcoin for the Befuddled addresses this very well. You can read it online for free with Google books.
Also chapter 7
The Cryptography Behind Bitcoin in the same book, is a very comprehensible explanation of ECC and the ECDSA algorithm employed in Bitcoin. With only knowledge of high school level math one could understand that.