Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's the best way to learn about the blockchain?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 77 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to learn about the blockchain?

#13

Post by davidw »

shp0ngle wrote: post #2

Everything in Bitcoinlandia is fairly superficial, since everyone is trying to sell Bitcoin and make himself rich. So it's like reading multi-level-marketing books. That being said. What's actually kind of good (with actual technical specifications) is Bitcoin wiki, even when it's slightly outdated; then official bitcoin website; and sometimes bitcoin stack exchange website (but that can become outdated too). I don't…

To contrast that, patio11 has written various things ragging on bitcoin from a tech/business perspective. It's well worth reading.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to learn about the blockchain?

#14

Post by lacker »

shp0ngle wrote: post #2

Everything in Bitcoinlandia is fairly superficial, since everyone is trying to sell Bitcoin and make himself rich. So it's like reading multi-level-marketing books. That being said. What's actually kind of good (with actual technical specifications) is Bitcoin wiki, even when it's slightly outdated; then official bitcoin website; and sometimes bitcoin stack exchange website (but that can become outdated too). I don't…

Learning about blockchains can certainly be disconnected from Bitcoin. Go read the Ethereum docs for example.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to learn about the blockchain?

#17

Post by wslh »

I think a good unorthodox start is skimming/looking at Q&A sorted by votes on [1] and [2]. A good book but oriented towards bitcoin is [3]. My company also made an spreadsheet comparing different blockchain approaches [4] to have a high level understanding (e.g. blocks speed, security vulnerabilities)

I work in the field and the most difficult thing is to separate the noise from the signal. On talks with financial institutions and the government, they say they want to use the blockchain but when you ask about how many nodes they are planning to run they came up with one, or doesn't understand the question. Also, there are a lot of use cases that are not realistic because they depend on oracles or there is no way to enforce the smart contract in the real world.

[1] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes

[2] http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-C...

[4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DQ770nGnHfJOoRSqTLmI...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to learn about the blockchain?

#19

Post by CoryG89 »

zmanian wrote: post #9

I highly recommend the Princeton book and associated video lectures as a place to get started. It does a great job of framing things in the context of the wider fields of cryptography and distribute systems research. http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/

I also recommend this book. I started reading it, figuring I would probably only read the beginning or gloss over it. It was so well written and so interesting that I ended up reading the whole textbook.
Post reply on HN