Does anyone know if there is a detailed explanation of how the segregated witness proposal works, i.e. a white paper or similar?
I've had little luck looking on-line and can only find overviews of it's proposed capabilities.
very much agree with
The two #bitcoin-wizards logs seem to explain it, including sipa/Pieter's current (and, in all likelihood, not-quite-final) implementation. I'd recommend reading that, while keeping in mind that the BIP is a work-in-progress, and that Pieter's presentation at Scaling Bitcoin next month should be a much easier way to understand what's going on.
That being said, the basic idea really isn't that hard to understand. The technical details do seem a bit tricky, though. I think I have an idea of how it'll work but will wait for the final presentation and BIP.