It truly is a wonderful paper. Lots of information in it. You don't need that much background knowledge to understand it, but it can take a few reads to wrap your mind around it.

I would suggest also taking a look at the annotated version of the whitepaper on Fermat's Library:

- https://fermatslibrary.com/s/bitcoin

I wrote some of the annotations and tried as much as possible to make it so that this annotated version would provide a motivated reader with all the resources needed to truly understand the bitcoin protocol.

Michael Nielsen's blogpost about Bitcoin (http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-a...) is also a great read.