To Former Colleagues & Friends -

When a fellow lawyer hired me to research crypto regulations, I pretended I knew something about them. Despite years as a financial regulator and banking consultant, I knew precious little. In fact, save a former colleague who is deep in the space, and a young hacker I know who thinks it's the second coming, most regular people I know are in the dark.

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We're not alone -- Harry Potter author J.K Rowling famously tweeted out a request for someone to "Please explain Bitcoin to me." The responses were so filled with lingo, as she called it "blah, blah, blah," that she finally asked people to stop the explaining. And this is a woman who invents alternate universes for a living.

I challenged myself to wade through all the lingo -- "decentralized" this and "peer-to-peer" that, with doses of Libertarianism, Austrian economics and complex monetary theory. Months later I emerged from the pile of books and charts on my wall, with a working understanding of the whole mess.

I started an article to explain it all - and decided to fall back on my high school newspaper adviser's teachings, of the classic Who, What, When, Where & Why. And here I offer an Old School, low-tech, no-lingo explanation of Bitcoin in 100 words or less: