Learning blockchain: where in the world to start?

Rosemary Lapka
Aug 8, 2017 · 7 min read

I first heard the term ‘blockchain’ in September 2016, when Jessi Baker of the blockchain start-up Provenance shared the concept during a webinar on new technology to improve human rights. Intrigued, I followed up on the Provenance.org website and gained an intuitive sense that this technology could be very useful to my field of sustainable supply chains.

This hunch was confirmed a few weeks later when Fortune reported that Walmart had partnered with IBM to track pork supply chains in China for food safety using distributed ledger technology. Over the followings months I began to casually monitor blockchain news, while in my day job I worked on challenges of managing sustainable supply chain data management using existing solutions and systems. Something switched in my mind one day in early March 2017 when I thought: ‘Why not apply blockchain to sustainable supply chain data? Why not me be one of the early advocates?’

For years my mother has struggled with how to answer the question ‘What does your daughter do?’ I’ve been trained as a graphic/communication designer, taught undergraduate design and sustainability studies in the Middle East, studied business and sustainability and worked for corporations, non-profits and small companies advancing sustainability practices and data in mostly food supply chains. On the surface, these fields may appear disparate. Yet each step has led, informed and merged with all experiences that came before, helping me take a more holistic view of challenges and potential solutions. The more I read about blockchain, the more it seemed to be the next logical addition to my experience and skillset.

But where in the world do I start to learn about blockchain?

As a sustainability & business professional with no formal connections to blockchain, I found it difficult to identify approachable resources to learn more and move beyond the superficial understanding of the technology. Most resources seemed either fairly technical and targeted towards professional developers/day traders or extremely high-level and targeting the business/finance crowd. Where should a non-technical professional go to gain deeper understanding?

Asking other professionals how they learned about blockchain didn’t provide much additional direction. I frequently received muddled answers of:

“I read a lot.”

“I talked to a lot of people.”

“I just sort of fell into it.”

Undaunted I began to seek out my own answers, trying to discover: who and what were legitimate sources? What topics would I need to learn if I wasn’t seeking to be the technical person? And the biggest question of all: what did I want to do with this technology?

From March 2017 to June 2017 reading and researching blockchain became my hobby, consuming my free time, weekends and vacation days. The following highlights the main resources I discovered during this period, which roughly fell into these categories:

  • Formal Education: Institutes & Programs
  • Informal Education: Blogs & Podcast
  • Current Events & News Media
  • Conferences & Social Media

The resources listed below are by no means exhaustive and may not be the most current. With the incredible rise of Bitcoin/Ethereum and ICOs in recent months, the web has many new resources and documentation since I began my self-study in early 2017.

However, I still hope the following documentation will provide a good foundation and inspiration for someone eager to learn more. If you have other resources you find helpful to learn blockchain, please share in the comments below. In the future, I will revisit this topic with more reflection and resources on learning blockchain.


Formal Educational: Institutes & Programs

Living in Boston at the time and being most familiar with formal education after completing two Masters degrees, I started my search looking at programs/certifications at established institutions. Searching Blockchain and MIT lead me to http://blockchain.mit.edu/ (Note: the site has been greatly enhanced since I found it in March 2017), where I dove into the Anders Brownworth visual demo of blockchain. The video moved me beyond the typical introductory paragraph I’d see elsewhere. It’s where I first heard of a ‘nonce’ and saw a demo of the power of hashing. Yet I couldn’t seem to find graduate or formal programs dedicated to blockchain that would answer my desire for ‘legitimate’ education and certification, nor training resources geared towards individuals that didn’t really want to be programmers. I also wanted a low-cost/low-commitment course to dip my toe into the blockchain water before I considered something as heavy (and likely expensive) as a graduate degree.

Further searching led me to the free blockchain MOOC on ‘Introduction to Digital Currency’ offered by the University of Nicosia. This 12-week long course aimed to be a comprehensive introduction to the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, giving an overview of the technical aspects and the broader non-technical business, legal, regulatory and other implications of the technology. While I was more interested in blockchain instead of cryptocurrencies, I recognized the course would still be useful to know more about bitcoin and other altcoins, given cryptocurrency was the foundational use case for blockchain technology.

The 7th MOOC course consisted of PDF lectures, covered by the individual student on her own time each week. Students were then encouraged to leave questions for the course instructors, University of Nicosia’s CEO Antonis Polemitis and Andreas Antonopoulos, author of the informative Mastering Bitcoin [free reading online]. I spent an average of 3 hours on each lecture per week, reading the slides once and then reviewing again to take detailed notes. When possible, I joined or watched the 1 hour weekly Q&A stream with Antonis or Andreas. The MOOC serves as the first course of the University of Nicosia’s MSc in Digital Currency, a completely online 1- year masters program and apparently the first blockchain masters degree in the world. As of the recent 7th MOOC, participation in the course qualified students for potential scholarships to the MSc program. I passed the course and the results were written into the Bitcoin blockchain as my first blockchain transaction! Given my interest on blockchain itself and less on currencies/tokens, I have currently chosen not to continue with the MSc but may investigate the option of the Professional Certificate.

Informal Education: Blogs & Podcasts

The MOOC slides alone generally provided a good overview of relevant topics. Even after the course, I’ve found myself referencing the slides/notes for reminders of foundational concepts. Yet my biggest learnings came by doing my own online searching for particular topics such as mining, consensus mechanisms, incentives, immutability and storage, etc. The well written and clear posts from Bits on blocks (including a ‘Gentle Introduction to Blockchain Technology’) were particularly helpful in clarifying some foundational topics. By searching various bitcoin/blockchain terms and reading a few sources allowed me to piece together the concepts/terms and see potential inconsistencies or poor/incorrect explanations.

I further challenged myself to understand more by listening to bitcoin & blockchain podcasts, letting the unfamiliar terms and technical concepts wash over me. Being a stickler for comprehensive research, I started listening to The Blockchain Show podcast in chronological order, which unwittingly allowed me to experience perspectives on vital blockchain events as if they were happening today (including The DAO before it was hacked for ˜$50M USD and prompted a controversial fork in the Ethereum blockchain). I found Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast to be helpful for providing clear explanations and relevant interviews with industry leaders, exploring questions on blockchain’s applications and challenges and alerting me to key blockchain events and people.

Current Events & News Media

One element that I didn’t fully appreciate when I started to learn about blockchain was how vital it was to keep up on current events in blockchain and cryptocurrency. News of new players emerged, ICO (initial coin offerings) records were broken, wallets were hacked and scaling protocols were debated. For example, in the last two weeks alone: there were three separate hacks of the Ethereum cryptocurrency and the Bitcoin community continues to grapple through the possibility (scratch that- reality) that the cryptocurrency will split into two chains. Each major news event could potentially have great ramifications for the value, perception and support of the blockchain technology, with the landscape continually shifting. My news feeds quickly became full of Coindesk and Cointelegraph articles for blockchain/cryptocurrency news.

Conferences & Social Media

Podcasts and new stories led me to discover many blockchain/cryptocurrency conferences, of which I tried to attend or volunteer at as many as I could. This included Business of Blockchain with the Digital Currency Initiative of the MIT Media Lab, Ethereal Summit, Consensus 2017 Hackathon & the Consensus 2017 Conference and Token Summit. Even if I wasn’t able to attend an event, I found agendas and recordings of the sessions to be extremely valuable to gaining insight into current topics and identifying key blockchain organizations/projects and people. I slowly began identifying and following key blockchain/distributed ledger players on Twitter (including Vitalik Buterin,‏ Emin Gün Sirer,‏ Mike Casey,Brian Behlendorf and Iliana Oris Valiente) and authors on Medium (Meltem Demirors, Nick Tomaino and Vinay Gupta), further flooding my various social media and news feeds with cryptocurrency information.


Over three months, the resources above helped me get to the point where I could read a news article or show up at a cryptocurrency conference and not feel lost. My ability to question fantastical claims increased. I began to get a sense of the landscape, the main characters and the politics/technology behind the scene. What I found only intrigued me more.

My exploration kicked into overdrive in July 2017, when I started a full-time self-directed Blockchain Learning Sabbatical. For the foreseeable future, I am devoting myself to the study and application of blockchain technology for supply chain data management, with a particular eye towards the opportunities for sustainability. I will further explore the technical aspects, teach myself some code and aim to explain the concepts back to a non-technical person. My goal is to identify practical applications of the technology, as well as clarify my role in creating those applications. In truth-I have no idea where this may lead but I’m excited to find out where it will go.

If you found this post helpful, please like, share and follow along for additional learnings.

Rosemary Lapka

Written by

Advocate for sustainable food systems, supply chain solutions & emerging tech | rosemarylapka.com

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