Before buying any stock or any financial product, you should do a bit of background reading so that you understand what you're buying and how much rival products cost. (alephblog.com)
It is, however, useful background reading as part of an architecture course. (newscientist.com)
I'm leaving background reading as an exercise for the reader; instead, I want to focus on how blockchain creates a distributed ledger with shared trust. (rackn.com)