The goal of this part of the book is to clearly understand what1 blockchains do, and why it is novel, and under which circumstances it can be useful. While doing so, we will discover a bit how they do it, but I will leave most of this to the readers to learn on their own. The how part would inevitably be long, very technical, and frankly not a contributor to the ultimate goal of this book named before.
We can see blockchain systems to some extent as a black-box machine. What matters is to understand what this machine can do, and therefore imagine what problems it can solve for us. It is less relevant to go into all the nitty-gritty details of how the machine works, if we are not yet sure what it can be used for.
This part is certainly the most important part of this book. In some sense, part 1 is the entire book, which is why it is followed by three summaries:
Which you should certainly read after this part of the book, and not at the very end.