About a month ago I decided to dive in and learn more about cryptocurrency since my investments are creeping with banks.
Then i discovered the challenges with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, is that it’s such a new and rapidly changing field that it’s hard to find any good books or established resources on the topics. You mostly have to read blog articles, original whitepapers, and Wikipedia pages and figure it out as you go.
Since it took me a while to filter through what was helpful and what wasn’t, I thought others might appreciate a list of the articles that were most helpful for me learning about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.
I’d recommend definitely reading everything in the “Getting Excited” and “Learning More About Bitcoin” sections, then picking and choosing from what sounds interesting in the rest of the article.
*Getting Excited About Bitcoin & Crypto in General
*Why Bitcoin Matters
By Marc Andreessen
This is the best intro to why you should be excited about Bitcoin. Andreessen Horowitz has been a major investor in Bitcoin related companies, and Marc Andreessen has been talking about its potential since the early days.
“One can hardly accuse Bitcoin of being an uncovered topic, yet the gulf between what the press and many regular people believe Bitcoin is, and what a growing critical mass of technologists believe Bitcoin is, remains enormous. In this post, I will explain why Bitcoin has so many Silicon Valley programmers and entrepreneurs all lathered up, and what I think Bitcoin’s future potential is.”
• Bitcoin — The Internet of Money
By Naval Ravikant
Naval wrote this post back in 2014, explaining how Bitcoin was so much more than just an online currency. He walks through some of the potential applications of the technology, many of which have since started being worked on by startups.
“Most people are only familiar with (b)itcoin the electronic currency, but more important is (B)itcoin, with a capital B, the underlying protocol, which encapsulates and distributes the functions of contract law.”
• How Digital Currency Will Change the World
By Brian Armstrong
Brian is the founder of Coinbase and wrote this article to explain how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could have a massive positive impact on global prosperity. The short version: as economic freedom increases, prosperity increases, and crypto has the potential to provide greater global economic freedom whether governments like it or not.
“Economic freedom is one of the great meta-problems of our time (right up there with A.I., quantum computing, and cheap renewable energy). If we can create more economic freedom in the world, it will serve as a giant economic stimulus package for the world, accelerate innovation, reduce wars, make the poorest 10% better off, overthrow corrupt governments, and raise happiness.”
• Learning More About Bitcoin
• The Original Bitcoin Whitepaper
By Satoshi Nakamoto
Read it once, go read other crypto stuff, read it again… keep doing this until the whole document makes sense. It’ll take a while, but you’ll get there. This is the original whitepaper introducing and explaining Bitcoin, and there’s really nothing better out there to understand on the subject.
“What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”
• By reading this article, you’re mining bitcoins
By Ritchie S. King
This article helps to understand the blockchain and mining parts of Bitcoin, which in turn will help the white paper make more sense next time you go back to read it.
“What bitcoin miners actually do could be better described as competitive bookkeeping. Miners build and maintain a gigantic public ledger containing a record of every bitcoin transaction in history. Every time somebody wants to send bitcoins to somebody else, the transfer has to be validated by miners: They check the ledger to make sure the sender isn’t transferring money she doesn’t have.”
• Coindesk Information
By Coindesk
For almost any other question you’d have about Bitcoin after reading the whitepaper, you can find a concise answer and explanation here. They explain everything in simple terms, and you may find yourself asking questions you didn’t know you should be asking.
• Fat Protocols
By Joel Monegro
This was extremely helpful for helping me understand the app/protocol difference and why it’s so important in the case of bitcoin and blockchain tech. It also highlights why this is a fundamental shift in the architecture of the Internet and applications built on it, and why that matters. Must read.
“This relationship between protocols and applications is reversed in the blockchain application stack. Value concentrates at the shared protocol layer and only a fraction of that value is distributed along at the applications layer. It’s a stack with “fat” protocols and “thin” applications.”
• The Fifth Protocol
By Naval Ravikant
Naval explains how coins can be used as a fifth protocol in machine to machine communication for the exchange of value, to weed out transactions and other demands on data that can be costly in huge quantities. It could be used to prevent Spam, DDOS attacks, etc. and even let machines operate autonomously among each other (such as a vending machine ordering its own restocks).
“Cryptocurrencies are electronic cash, and as such, will be used by electronic agents to exchange value, verify contracts, and track identity and reputation. All of a sudden, the computing resources spent by the Bitcoin miners doesn’t seem wasted – it seems efficient, given that it can be used for congestion control and routing of other network resources.
Well said