Bitcoin for (very very) beginners

I’m a nerd.   Being a nerd I understand technology.   However I know that some people are not nerds.   

Here is the simplest explanation of why/how bitcoin works as I could think of.

Imagine yourself stranded on an island with 4 other people, for a total of 5 people.   All you have are pens and paper.    You need to survive, so everybody needs to work. One person will pick apples, one will build houses, one will gather firewood, one clean, and one make clothes.

Here is how the monetary system *kind of* works today.   Lets call this Island “Dollar Island”

Person A builds one house per day

Person B gathers 100 apples

Person C gathers one cord of firewood

Person D cleans for 10 hours

Person E makes five sets of clothes.

Because the island has no currency, everything is recorded on one piece of paper by one person to keep record of what everybody did. 

One year later, the island economy is so complex that the piece of paper is now a book of what each individual has contributed to the island, and what he or she can take from the all purpose bounty, proportional to the work input they put into the economy..

Now lets say a one of the 5 island workers(named Ben Bernake) gets tired of working.    He finds the book of records, and starts to change them all.    He goes through the book and doubles his output every day on the paper.   He now has the right to twice as much of the island bounty, while everybody else pays for it by getting proportionally less.   Nobody can prove him wrong, because there is only one record, and he is now in charge of it.    Ben takes his free stuff and prospers without actually working for it.  Everybody else got cheated out of their work.   (hint: This is what the Central Banks are doing today, and have been doing for the past 93 or so years)

Now lets switch over to neighboring island “Island Bitcoin”

The ONLY difference between Island Dollar and Island Bitcoin, is that on Island Bitcoin, each resident keeps his OWN record.   Now after a year, there are 5 identical books of record.   Big Ben Bernake can change his record book all he wants (he can even burn it), but the other 4 record books still exist and will prove the modified one wrong.

In the bitcoin network there are thousands of books of records.   There are so many records, that the top 500 super-computers in the world, multiplied times 8, could not change the record.

If you easily understood the above comparison, put a currency on each island, and instead of writing down goods produced, write down who has how much currency each person has/earns in our "book".   Every transaction, every time two people trade currency or goods, it gets recorded in every bodies book.   No single person can manipulate the economy, because everybody has their own record of it.