There seems to be plenty of introductions to Bitcoin on the internet but most of them seem to focus on the technology and gloss over the important tidbits you need so that you have a proper frame of reference. So I am going to post my own Bitcoin 101 in segments and I hope it encompasses what you need to know before being introduced to Bitcoin.
bitcoin (lowercase 'b') is not a thing, it is a unit of measure: What gets most people hung up at the beginning is this idea that I have a bitcoin and then it is somehow divided into parts of a bitcoin. The mental image is that I sent part of this bitcoin to someone and it gets mixed with other parts of bitcoin and somehow it all traces back to some original single bitcoin. That paradigm is incorrect. Don't let the name fool you. Don't think of it like a coin. Instead what someone will send you is a transaction and that transaction will be worth a certain amount of bitcoin. That transaction is measured in bitcoin. In truth US dollars are like this as well. Someone will hand you a bill that is measured as 20 dollars, or a coin that is measured as 5/100 of a dollar. There is no originating dollar that your nickle is part of.
In summary, the thing that is sent on the Bitcoin network is a transaction (or spend). This transaction is measured in bitcoin.
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