Learning Blockchain Series — Part I: What worked and didn’t for me

learning little by little

I’ve spent the last months learning about blockchain in my spare time. Its crazy and hard to stop thinking about once you start. Its an amazing technology, which I’m trying to break down by learning/doing.

I’m sharing results of what I learned, key questions, and resources that were most helpful.

I’m focused on trying to learn+build something for the blockchain, that will deliver 10x more value over the next 10 years.

So here goes a series of posts where I start from the basics and will go deeper with each post. follow along if you are interested. I’m writing mostly so I can make sure I’m getting this all right. Please feel free to suggest edits.

Blockchain came from Bitcoin, which solved the double spend problem by delivering a single immutable ledger of all transactions, hosted by many computers on a network and requiring no centralized governance. ok now breaking it out word for word

Blockchain — literally a chain of blocks, connected to each other that shows what changed (new transactions and balances) since the last block.

Bitcoin — started from this paper, by this guy (maybe?) that is 9 beautiful pages of how to build a ledger that does not require a “trusted” 3rd party (like a bank) to transact

Double Spend Problem — in the physical world, if I give you $10 bill I cannot give it to someone else, since I dont have it anymore. In the digital world, I can send two transactions of $10 each to different people at the same time, and they would not know. Thats why the bank takes your money before starting to send it to someone else

Single Immutable Ledger — everyone has the same version of the transactions that occurred, and it cannot be altered by anyone

Hosted by Many computers — everyone on the network can run a node to process transactions, kind of like when Napster would host mp3 files and you didnt need a central server to download them

No centralized governance — most systems require a decision maker for when things dont work e.g. bank, treasury, … but this system does not need that

Why, how come, whats changing?

Before banks, we traded our goods e.g. my goat for your book

after blockchain, we will still trade our goods e.g. my code for your book

Only the mechanism/medium of exchange is changing. Like before we sent letters and then came email. Goodbye post office.

Most common questions:

Can I control the Blockchain?

The Blockchain. No. (A large public blockchain like Ethererum)

A Blockchain. Yes. You can run one on your computer / internal network. There is an army of consultants trying to sell this to companies as permission based blockchains and there are some interesting use cases.

What is the difference between this and any other database?

A public blockchain is a database that is all open source, and does not have a single all-powerful administrator group.

If its users disagree with how its being run, they can continue to develop their own version (fork: more on this later) of the database while keeping all the previous data in-tact. e.g. if we didnt like how Facebook was being run, we could ‘fork’ the facebook and keep all our friends, photos etc.

A private/permission based blockchain is just another database application using new ‘blockchain’ technology. If you dont like it or how its being run, well then tough luck.

Why is blockchain like the internet?

Its censorship resistant. Countries can block apps like Coinbase and websites that use blockchain, but not the blockchain itself e.g like Pakistan banned Youtube (lol) but you could still watch videos on Vimeo etc. And there is also VPN

How to start learning about this stuff?

There is a ton of material out there. Here is how I started (in order of priority) for things that worked, for each item there are other sources but this was the best one that I came across

1. Chatting with Anthony Di Iorio and others at Decentral who has been in this space for a long time. Anthony installed Jaxx on my phone and gave me a quick demo at a One Eleven event in May 2017
2. Reading Whitepapers: for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockstack, Kin and others
3. Twitter: Follow OG crypto people on twitter — Naval Ravikant has a great list here . Vitalik Buterin is amazing to follow
4. Listen to Unchained podcast from Laura Shin, and Unconfirmed
5. Follow tutorials and in-depth overviews from Preethi Kasireddy (link), ConsenSys (link) and Manuel Araoz (link)
6. Complete Certified Ethereum Developer Course at TheBlockChainHub
7. Follow github code repositories and improvement proposals to Ethereum, Bitcoin
8. Join slack channels for Blockstack Inc, Blockchain Developers United and others
9. Read gitter comments for Andreas M. Antonopoulos new book Mastering Ethereum
10. Build my own projects using blockchain (starting with my own token, voting, escrow, coin-toss, and a way to make ICOs less scammy)

Here is stuff that did not work as well, primarily because there is too much going and limited opportunity to learn/build anything here

1. Whatsapp/Telegram/Discord Groups — too much going on, focused on building communities to launch/deliver on ICO promises
2. Follow John McAfee and others on twitter — too much crazy going on, not enough time to really absorb anything
3. Blockchain Revolution Book: Hard to read the book, particularly as I was reading it when news of Alex Tapscott’s aborted public listing came out
4. Build an ethereum miner — did this over the holidays, just for the fun of putting together a computer, didnt run it for too long since the economics were not so viable, and I didnt want to burn my house down while I was out of town
5. Start a daily dispatch to comment on new ICOs — most people were interested, but only in a quick buck not particularly learning about the analysis
6. Installing the Blockstack browser and creating an account; interesting project with lots of promise and lots of development work to go which is progressing rapidly

Which Cryptos should I buy now?

Picking the right crypto is the same as trying your luck at the roulette table, or figuring out which new listing on the Nasdaq is the next Google. After you are done placing your bets, there should hopefully still be some time left to actually build something.