All the recent media attention on Bitcoin inspired me to learn how Bitcoin really works, right down to the bytes flowing through the network. Normal people use software[1] that hides what is really going on, but I wanted to get a hands-on understanding of the Bitcoin protocol. My goal was to use the Bitcoin system directly: create a Bitcoin transaction manually, feed it into the system as hex data, and see how it gets processed. This turned out to be considerably harder than I expected, but I learned a lot in the process and hopefully you will find it interesting.
(Feb 23: I have a new article that covers the technical details of mining. If you like this article, check out my mining article too.)

This blog post starts with a quick overview of Bitcoin and then jumps into the low-level details: creating a Bitcoin address, making a transaction, signing the transaction, feeding the transaction into the peer-to-peer network, and observing the results.