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A curated list for getting up to speed on crypto and decentralized networks.
The content on the toplevel page contains what we consider essential reading. Child pages contain deeper, topic-specific information to review afterward.
The lists here are a work in progress. We welcome any feedback or criticism! Please open a PR/issue with any suggestions or corrections.
Nothing in this repo constitutes financial or legal advice.
We've identified four central themes behind crypto's value proposition:
Broadly speaking, decentralization means distributed and unpermissioned. In the ideal case, anyone can participate in the network, and the participants are both physically and socioeconomically spread apart.
Decentralization is often paired with cryptoeconomics to design an incentive model that perpetuates a healthy network. For example, network participants may be rewarded with a "native token" when they exhibit good behavior. This does require a certain level of scale, and the network is usually provably robust against bad actors under a certain threshold (see the section on Byzantine Fault Tolerance). As the network grows in size, it becomes increasingly difficult for a bad actor (or coalition of bad actors) to attack the network, because there are enough honest participants that are economically (and perhaps even philosophically) incentivized to perpetuate the network. Roughly speaking, the bad actor must have more to gain than lose from performing the bad action (ie. paying the network penalty eg. slashing + opportunity cost of rewards for honesty * probability attack is even successful). In other words, the expected value of the bad action must be positive.
Here's the list of relevant reading:
The currency proposition:
The state machine proposition:
The open API proposition:
The token proposition:
More: see in-depth page: Why
We think it's essential reading to understand how bitcoin works, and how smart contracts (pioneered by Ethereum) work.
In-depth page: DeFi
Next, let's try to understand the major kinds of financial dApps on the blockchain. Although there are many types, we'd say the two most common are:
A third, which can be thought of as a competitor to (1) of sorts, is:
Initial reading material on these categories:
For much more, see our in-depth page on DeFi
In-depth page: NFT
In-depth page: DAO
At this point, we'd recommend learning about alternative smart contract blockchains.
A fundamental design decision in blockchains is the mechanism by which block producers (miners in Bitcoin and Eth 1.0) come to consensus on the next block. This problem of doing so in a distributed system with a variety of actors--some of whom may be sending intentionally confusing or destabilizing messages to their peers--is the key to establishing consensus and progressing the blockchain.
Bitcoin and Eth 1.0 accomplish this by proof of work ("Nakamoto consensus"), but most other blockchains use variants of a different family of algorithms referred to as Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) algorithms.
In-depth page: L1
At this point you might want to dig into different L1 blockchains--both their protocol designs and their ecosystems. See in-depth pages below:
In-depth page: L2
In-depth page: TradingDynamics
In-depth page: MEV/Arbitrage
In-depth page: Development
In-depth page: EconDesign
In-depth page: Tools
Check your understanding with these thought questions and exercises.
In-depth page: Other Lists
In-depth page: Researchers