With the trial involving the black market website Silk Road underway, you may be hearing a lot about the shady-seeming digital currency known as bitcoin. Its value soars; its value plunges. Its origins in the high-powered computers of a scattered population of bitcoin “miners” has the feel of an elaborate fiction. And its anonymous, unstable nature can make getting your mind around it rather like studying a handful of water.

But if the prognosticating and bickering over bitcoin is enough to eclipse its promise (and there are some fascinating possibilities in the notion of a decentralized currency), there is a better (and more soothing) way for you to tune in to this burgeoning economy.