The technology side of all this is definitely interesting, but don't be fooled into thinking it's too interesting; you can read one guys book (the recommendations below are good) and understand how it works in enough detail. The basic idea is a series of data blobs with a cryptographic signature for each blob, with (importantly) the signature of the previous blob in the series included in the next blob. Then there is some distributed consensus mechanism (of which many have been devised) to come to consensus on which blob is canonically the next one in the series. Everything else is details or game theory.