I understood the important obvious parts of Bitcoin at one point, but haven't cared enough to retain that knowledge perfectly well. But I gather the key plot points of this fiasco revolve entirely around simple public-key cryptography- underneath all this mess about genesis blocks and transaction hashes, the issue is that Craig hasn't shown us he can encrypt messages with any of Satoshi's special private keys. (Correct me if I'm missing something there.) That, along with a two-sentence "public-key cryptography is magic that lets you..." primer, could be explained to any interested highschool graduate in a short blog post... by someone who cared more about being understood than generating ad revenue, at least.