Cryptocurrency has been around for 9 years since the first release of Bitcoin software on January 3, 2009. While most people refer to the underlying technology as “blockchain”, and Bitcoin as the first application built on top of blockchain, it’s actually quite the opposite. Most videos and tutorials on the web will throw a lot of buzz words at your and tell you how blockchain can disrupt the trust mechanism before you even realize what a blockchain is. You end up with a feeling that you think you know what a blockchain is, and continue with your old life or start checking out one of those fancy ICO websites. Perphas you will buy some bitcoins or ethers, but that’s the end of the story.
To better understand Bitcoin and blockchain technology in general, you really have to dive deep into it. Not all the technical details about how exactly things are handled, but what problems they’re trying to solve, why they’re worth solving and how they’re being solved. Although a lot of people have the motivation to do their own research, they’re having a hard time going through the scattered materials and figuring out which one to look first.
This repo assembles a list of materials you should go through, in order, to help you navigate through the blockchain world.
If you’re eager to learn about blockchain and yet you don’t want to learn anything about Bitcoin, be patient, we will get there. Understanding Bitcoin is the only way you can fully understand blockchain, there’s simply no shortcut.
It’s extremely important to understand what started it all, Bitcoin, and what problem it’s trying to solve. It all boils down to a term that we’re all familiar with, but very few of us knows what it means: money. Money is one of the earliest and most fundamental inventions of all time. If you go back in time, money started out as a decentralized system where you can pick up a shell and exchange for a banana with it. As the human society grows in complexity, money became controlled by the government. While you can transact with cash in a decentralized peer-to-peer manner, the issuance of cash is controlled by the government. Even if you own cash, you have no say of its purchasing power in the future.
With digital currency (the number that shows up in your bank account), the problem becomes worse. You have no direct control over your money now (daily spend and withdraw limit for example), and transacting money becomes centralized and exclusive (you cannot send digital US dollar to someone without a bank account). Worst case scenario, you never get your money back if the bank went bankrupt. Bitcoin is trying to solve all of that.
Read the Introduction section to find out yourselve. If you don’t think that’s a problem worth solving, you can stop here.
Money is an ancient invention that predates human history, yet very few people understand how it works. Try to ask yourself a few very silly questions: why do we need money? Where does money come from? How much money are there in the world? What’s the difference between money and currency?