"[…] It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle.

The result is a distributed system with no single point of failure. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money & transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double-spending"… ~Satoshi.

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/m/discussion?id=2003008%3ATopic%3A9402