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> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge a

• mightyRodri 4y ago
  I wouldnt worry, the whole system up to this point has used "technobabble" as a means to confuse and impress outsiders. When reading up on it, there is no meaning to find besides "yep, its a linked list allright".
  • lmarcos 4y ago
    I thought the same at the beginning. Yet somehow I think I'm missing something a bit more complex (complicated?) than just "linked lists". I don't want to understand only the theory but also the "practice" (e.g., one could read all about distributed systems... But one really gets the gist of it until one has to deal with real world networks in the cloud or on prem, dealing with real systems)
    • mightyRodri 4y ago
      Have you seen the "Line goes up" summary by Dan Olson? It puts the crypto sphere into context. From that many descisions and marketing practices start to make sense.
      • fastball 4y ago
        Crypto being full of grifters does not mean that the actual developers in the space are using "technobabble" in order to sound smarter without actually introducing new concepts. Crypto is actually innovating in ways that are broadly applicable to computer science in general, e.g. with all the work being done on Zero-Knowledge Proofs. And those innovations require new words because they are new concepts. I think it should be somewhat obvious to anyone that has actually looked at the space that devs are not just re-naming existing ideas.
        • LtWorf 4y ago
          > Crypto is actually innovating in ways that are broadly applicable to computer science in general Most of it is just companies putting blockchains everywhere because VCs give them money in that case. Nothing scientific about that.
          • fastball 4y ago
            Again, the two things are not mutually exclusive. Most people/orgs can be applying blockchain tech in ways that are not actually useful (or are actively harmful), but that doesn't mean there aren't people in that same space doing novel work that requires new terms in order to communicate with other experts/researchers/developers efficiently and effectively.
      • AgentME 4y ago
        In that video he searches for the griftiest projects and treats them as defining the whole technology. Suggesting it as an answer here is like responding to a question about how eBay is engineered and showing off the scammiest eBay auction pages you can find by searching for the lowest-rated users.
        • pcthrowaway 4y ago
          I actually thought Line Goes Up was pretty well informed and well-presented. It's definitely one-sided, but I think there were only a couple of statements that I found questionable. I work in the crypto industry, and definitely agree there's a ton of innovation in the space, but the innovations lie at an incredibly technical intersection of cryptography, game theory, and distributed networks. Get marketing, sales, and investment capital involved in the mix (which almost every project has), and you have a bundle of products being thrust in front of the public which they can't rigorously evaluate, and because everything is directly incentivized, tons of scammers, grifters, liars, and fraudsters. When my non-technical friends ask me about crypto, I'm happy to tell them some of the things I think are really cool about it. But I don't recommend buying anything based on my perspective; it's basically gambling (even if you're well-informed)
        • jekrb 4y ago
          Well yeah this is how he gets paid. It's not about being informative about a class of technology, its about generating clicks to get more patreon subscriptions and youtube ad payments.
    • ilaksh 4y ago
      Try to imagine you are building a new banking system, and you want it to be secure. How would you A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number and B) ensure that, even if those payments were secure, there was no other cheating, such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million? Generally speaking the way to handle those requirements is by employing cryptographic signatures and public blockchain(s), and the result is usually referred to as a cryptocurrency.
      • cowtools 4y ago
        There's also chaum's e-cash
        • AgentME 4y ago
          It relied on a central authority to work, and that's very related to why it no longer works.
          • wruza 4y ago
            David Chaum opined then “As the Web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash Not sure how this opinion relates to failure, but just in case, things only got worse since.
      • Nursie 4y ago
        > A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number We have a whole bunch of these systems, like Open Banking payments in the UK, Pix in Brazil, and to a lesser extent stuff like Apple/Amazon pay and other payment proxies which don't require you to expose account numbers to merchants. Physical credit-card transactions work this way too, as the chips have built-in cryptographic processors. > such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million? This is not a problem people really have. Having a limited quantity of your means of exchange is not a desirable quality in a currency.
  • ramraj07 4y ago
    The mark of ignorance is to dismiss things you “think” are beneath you before any real consideration. In my opinion too, the crypto crowd is typically one I like to avoid. But to dismiss the tech behind it as babble is sad.
    • desindol 4y ago
      It’s 12 year old tech that gets propped up as innovative every 2 months. I can understand his sentiment.
      • fastball 4y ago
        A. 12 years old is relatively new for tech / computer science. There aren't that many novel / widely adopted computer science ideas introduced each year. B. This "merge" in particular utilizes innovations in computer science that were non-existent 12 years ago when the original Bitcoin whitepaper was published. C. There continues to be loads of cutting edge CS research that is broadly applicable to the entire industry but is being spear-headed by blockchain development, for example work on Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
        • retcore 4y ago
          Proof of stake is a application not computer science. What fundamental new knowledge into computing are you thinking about attributing?
          • fastball 4y ago
            PoS is an application of what?
            • sterlind 4y ago
              to be really pedantic, I'd say PoS is an economic breakthrough rather than heavy-duty computer science, strictly speaking. the actual math of the consensus algorithms seems relatively simple, the challenge is aligning all the incentives so that adversaries in a group of anonymous people have nothing to gain by subverting the rules. I will gladly give a Turing award to whoever formally proves the safety and liveness of Gasper like Lamport did for Paxos.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    I could say the same thing about reading fields I don't generally understand, and it can seem like "technobabble" because I don't understand the meaning of words they are using, since some things are written with a certain audience in mind that possesses the knowledge to understand the content, like many academic papers. However, I don't regularly dismiss fields like that, but rather I understand that not everything is meant for me to understand without a deeper meaning. Not sure why anyone would treat the (technical) ecosystem of cryptocurrencies differently. Seems like a non-curious way of acting. Just like I realize the problems pornography introduces to the world, but reading and speaking with engineers working at those companies are still a fruitful endeavour for me.
    • retcore 4y ago
      Genuine research states claims for the methods and discovery, making it often quite easy to work backwards from the conclusions to the theory. No such logic seems to exist in the crypto culture.
      • 0xrips 4y ago
        • paulgb 4y ago
          Here’s an example of a well-hyped, well-funded crypto startup being loose with words that have well-understood technical meaning outside of crypto. > The "Helium 5G" network is instead a 4G LTE CBRS network, which right now has significant advantages over 5G but doesn't have the "5G" moniker Helium and its partners wanted for marketing. So it's just calling it 5G because, apparently, anyone can use any word to mean anything. https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-hot-air https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-just-ho... Helium was, until recently, one of the companies bound to come up if you asked around for real-world use cases of crypto.
          • ForHackernews 4y ago
  • pbak 4y ago
    Yeah, Fully distributed consistency algorithms running on N nodes on linked list in which each node is a Turing-machine program run concurrently on N nodes, whose consistency shall also be insured, and which can write on said linked-list. Everything has absolutely tons of edge-cases related to the distributed nature of the thing to take care of. Of course, I haven't even begun anything about the whole "crypto" part, and minimizing power usage. Absolutely no meaning besides "linked lists", riiiight...
  • WFHRenaissance 4y ago
    bonk
  • spaceman_2020 4y ago
    smart contracts offer legitimate efficiency gains over some traditional models Even something like a Dex can be far superior to traditional order book exchange models in some cases
  • bowsamic 4y ago
    It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually a difficult problem that involves very interesting challenges
    • LtWorf 4y ago
      The "innovation" in the original blockchain is that it is computationally expensive on purpose, to create "economic value". There is no computer science innovation there. Computer scientists didn't come up with the idea because it made no sense. And it all went downhill from there.
      • bowsamic 4y ago
        No, the goal wasn't to create economic value. The goal was to make it prohibitively expensive to recreate the chain and thus fool someone else. Satoshi did not say that the purpose of PoW was to "create economic value".
        • LtWorf 4y ago
          And a digital signature couldn't be used because?
          • bowsamic 4y ago
            A digital signature alone cannot prevent double spending
            • LtWorf 4y ago
              No, going back in the list of transactions can.
              • bowsamic 4y ago
  • somenameforme 4y ago
    The internet is fundamentally little more than the ability to send 1s and 0s from point A to point B. So you mean like me calling you and saying 0 1 0? Well, yeah kind of, but faster! And we can even have conference calls! It's going to change the entire world! Yeah, ok... Well, I'm going to leave now. Wait, sorry... I mean I'm going to '0 1 1 0' now. Wow, I can feel the world shifting already. The applications of a technology often are far greater than the most simplified fundamental upon which it is built.
• edgyquant 4y ago
  That’s because eth is a hype train. If you’re a distributed systems engineer you definitely grasp it
• mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  The official Ethereum docs [0] are a good starting point. There are a lot of good resources under the "Learn" tab as well. [0] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/
  • lmarcos 4y ago
    Thanks. I know the official docs. They just feel to me like the official docs of K8s (they are good, but not great. Great in the sense of "Brian Kernighan" or "Stevens" book kind of great). I guess there are not many more options out there I'm afraid.
    • mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
      I may be able to recommend other resources if you tell me what "kind" of docs you are looking for. Maybe an example from another field?
      • lmarcos 4y ago
        Perhaps it's due to my ignorance in the field or perhaps it's because the field is pretty young: I would like to read something from the Linus Torvalds/Brian Kernighan/Richard Stevens of the crypto world.
        • 0xrips 4y ago
          the closest you'll get to that is probably vitalik buterin's upcoming book "proof of stake: the making of ethereum and the philosophy of blockchains"
        • jlokier 4y ago
          In that case I suggest https://vitalik.ca/ https://vitalik.ca/ and dip into articles with titles that appeal to you. He covers a range from high level opinion essays to (imho) good technical simplified explanations of the special kinds of low-level cryptography. I've personally found the articles on how SNARKs and STARKs work very helpful. Note that Ethereum and the other "smart contract" blockchains which link general program execution with transactions, are very different from Bitcoin and the other "money only" blockchains. I also suggest https://ethereum-magicians.org/ https://ethereum-magicians.org/ if you want to get more into the guts of protocol discussions or just see them, and the Eth R&D discord.
• silisili 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value. I'm an avid reader and learner, but only if the topic is interesting or makes sense. Cryptocoins meet neither of those criteria -to me-. That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than crypto. Guess we'll see.
  • ilaksh 4y ago
    The first problem that cryptocurrency solves is, how can to securely make transactions without giving away our secrets such as critical account numbers. It accomplishes this using cryptographic signatures. Other systems that do not use cryptography and instead often rely on trust in exchanging critical secrets, such as how the banking system generally works, are outdated.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • silisili 4y ago
      There are a plethora of transfer systems in the banking world that do the same, assuming you are talking about ACH info. Venmo, Cashapp, Paypal et al. You could argue the intermediary knows the info, but most crypto buyers also use an intermediary.
      • nibbleshifter 4y ago
        Venmo, cashapp, and PayPal all have geographic restrictions (only one of those works where I live), and also pretty shit reputations - PayPal routinely just dicks its users and freezes their funds indefinitely. Crypto doesn't give a shit about borders, there's no intermediary who can freeze your assets (unless you decide to leave them on am exchange), etc.
        • Melchori 4y ago
          This is not a new feature of crypto. It's ignorance. You can easily do that with other tech. Crypto right now is just to new to have been properly regulated yet. And while you are true that you can run your own wallet, you are depending on the decentralized network, you do need a certain amount of stabity and you need to make sure you can recover and keep your wallet. Enough people demonstrated at least with the last point and millions lost in locked away wallets that there are still fundamental problems.
• ilaksh 4y ago
  https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800070.802212 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800070.802212 Probabilistic Encryption & How To Play Mental Poker Keeping Secret All Partial Information https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/gilad-algorand-eprint.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/gilad-algorand-... Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies http://people.csail.mit.edu/silvio/Selected%20Scientific%20Papers/Digital%20Signatures/A_Digital_Signature_Scheme_Secure_Against_Adaptive_Chosen-Message_Attack.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/silvio/Selected%20Scientific%20P... A DIGITAL SIGNATURE SCHEME SECURE AGAINST ADAPTIVE CHOSEN-MESSAGE ATTACKS*
• gjs278 4y ago
• cowtools 4y ago
  Here is a good video that basically explains everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 This is not a very good explanation, but basically, you can have a "currency" using just asymmetric key cryptography: users simply sign "transactions". The problem is that you need a central authority to confirm the order of transactions, otherwise the recipient of a "transaction" will not know if the funds associated with that transaction have already been spent to someone else ("double spending"). You can solve this using hashcash to make the transaction order hard to reverse- creating a "proof-of-work" by doing something that is easy to verify but hard to determine (like reversing a hash function). Another method is "proof-of-stake" wherein transaction order is not signed by a central authority but instead general users that are guided by some internal incentive structure. Cryptocurrency is often expensive to run or use because a cryptocurrency transaction has to be synchronized across the entire network of that cryptocurrency, and there are incentive structures like fees to prevent people from spamming the network. There is also tech like zero-knowlege-proofs, multisig, etc. that can do interesting stuff. But this is the basic concept.
  • jonasbostoen 4y ago
    There is a good course by Tim Roughgarden: Foundations of Blockchains (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNJGPI0fuFA&list=PLEGCF-WLh2RLOHv_xUGLqRts_9JxrckiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNJGPI0fuFA&list=PLEGCF-WLh2...)
  • wruza 4y ago
    Is there any research on cryptomoney with central authorities, but also with reduced attack surfaces on a whole system? E.g. authority may be cryptographically bound in some way to only store the database and emit new tokens, but cannot spend them because they get freeze-signed by a receiver to their wallet. Then when you get a payment you check the path of money and algorithmically accept that path only. Anyone who accepts a similar subpath is on their own, because it is double-spending. Subpaths within few minutes self-cancel to prevent instant double-spend. This is just a vague example, not a working idea. The point of it is that the level of security and trustlessness is not always required to be absolute. E.g. even with fully-secure pow crypto we still have to trust non-crypto claims about usdt, [non?]shitcoins, “hot” wallets, and other maybe-not-ponzis.
• jll29 4y ago
  Read 'Mastering Ethereum' https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Contracts/dp/1491971940 https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Con... The short of it is: - The block chain is a distributed ledger database, where all peers hold a full copy to avoid manipulation (faking an entry is only possible by controlling >50% of machines in this peer-to-peer network). - Spending money is implemented by adding a transactional record to the blockchain ledger at the end saying X amount moved from account A to B. A block is like a page in a paper ledger and they are appended with cryptographic hashes to avoid improper interference. - Ethereum supports smart contracts, which are little scripts in a language called Solidity. So you can implement legally binding (and unstoppable) contracts along the lines of "if (condition) then (pay some money to someone)". Executing smart contracts cost a little bit of money. All Ethereum nodes collectively implement a distributed VM, and that money (called "gas") is the incentive to keep the network running. Smart contracts are highly interesting, and they have applications far beyond electronic currencies. For example, we played with implementing electronic rights management (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_22 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_... - which turned out to be less than ideal due to a stack size limit in the current Ethereum VM, but hey). - Whenever a new block (page in the ledger) needs to be created because the previous one is full, a randomized alg. determines who is permitted to do that ("mining"). The old process (proof of work) was environmentally a disaster (it still is for the Bitcoin ecosystem), which is why the Ethereum people implemented a smarter method (proof of stake - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake).
  • FearNotDaniel 4y ago
    Excellent and very clear summary, as far as I can tell. My only niggle is that smart contracts are, in practice, neither legally binding nor unstoppable... the story of the DAO Hack/Hard Fork [0] proved that consensus can overrule "the invisible hand of the blockchain" during a particularly egregious incident. [0] https://ogucluturk.medium.com/the-dao-hack-explained-unfortunate-take-off-of-smart-contracts-2bd8c8db3562 https://ogucluturk.medium.com/the-dao-hack-explained-unfortu...
    • 4y ago
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  Mastering Ethereum is pretty good Came out about 4 years ago
• lloppal 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
• im3w1l 4y ago
  Here's your executive summary. Proof of stake... is much cheaper - less inflation. is more environmentally friendly. with PoS, only people who already own ethereum can mine. Rich get richer. has less desirable consensus properties. Many people keep coins on a handful of exchanges - now those will control the network. Nothing-at-stake attack.
  • staringback 4y ago
    You have no idea what you're saying
• tarsinge 4y ago
  Another commenter posted an interesting article regarding how PoS works: https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-stake https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-stake
• ebonassi 4y ago
  [dead]
• chx 4y ago
  Nothing is going on. You are on the right track. There's an incredible amount of word salad piled on the fact that people are playing a negative sum game when getting involved with any cryptocurrency that has transaction fees.
  • svantana 4y ago
    Not true! Cryptocurrencies have real-world productive use cases such as money-laundering, ransomware, drug and weapons trade, terrorist financing etc. As well as some less-morally-wrong stuff like hiding from oppressive regimes. A bet on crypto is a bet on the future of these activities.
    • anhner 4y ago
      I think you forgot "contributing to climate change by using as much energy as a small country" which may not apply to ethereum anymore, but it sure still applies to bitcoin
      • svantana 4y ago
        True, but that's hardly a use case.
• glintik 4y ago
  They just mean “crypto industry”, not all IT industry.
• asenna 4y ago
  > preferably books and not random blogs The tech in Blockchain/Web3 world is changing and evolving incredibly fast (as is evident from this historic event today) and so by the time books come out, they already become outdated. I would highly recommend reading Vitalik's blog[1]. He talks about various topics and has a knack for explaining things brilliantly. [1] https://vitalik.ca/ https://vitalik.ca/
• Yuioup 4y ago
  It's all bullshit.
• preseinger 4y ago
  Don't feel ashamed. The entire ecosystem is unsound, and the "technicalities" are the stuff that CS201 courses dismiss as irrelevant. There's no reason for a technologist to care about it.
• irae 4y ago
  The Bitcoin Whitepaper is fairly small and quite an easy read, and it is the source of all this ideas. There is only a couple of math formulas that you don't need to fully understand to understand the paper itself. Some of the concepts on the paper deserve to be explored further and you can resort to Wikipedia to dive deeper. I find the book "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous a good read to break down those concepts. Nevermind the extremists or so called "maximalists" and their exaggerations. The book is a really good intro to macro economics and helps understanding why cryptocurrency is interesting as a store of wealth and/or money replacement.
• killerstorm 4y ago
  As someone who worked with blockchains & crypto for 10+ years, I'd actually recommend against reading "serious references". "What is going on now" is largely the same thing as before: * consensus / Sybil resistance / game-theory / "crypto-economics" * cryptography - signatures, data structures (e.g. Merkle tree) * p2p networking * deterministic computation / virtual machines If you have a solid CS/software engineering background, you probably already know 90% of it. I guess crypto-specific consensus might be new, but you can get a good grasp reading few articles. And that part is actually opinionated, so you need to decide on a camp before you read materials. Bitcoin people would likely disagree with anything written about PoS. Another fun thing is Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). That's actually quite new, complex and might be interesting. The rest can be rather boring. Users submit cryptographically-signed commands (transactions) which processed in a deterministic fashion. I'm not sure it's worth reading a whole book about it.
  • mratsim 4y ago
    consensus is strongly related to distributed computing fault tolerance and database or file systems' atomicity and integrity in case of crash. Basically problems that involve multiple readers and multiple writers.
    • killerstorm 4y ago
      Distributed computing research is focused mostly on increasing throughout, reducing latency and enabling parallelism and concurrency. OTOH cryptocurrency consensus is mostly about answering a question: "How do we prevent bad guys from stealing money or doing other nasty things?" While a concept of Byzantine Fault Tolerance was known before Bitcoin, it was never really applied in practice AFAIK - people thought it's overkill. Also I'd say doing it within a private network is one thing, and doing it with random weirdos on internet is completely different. Distributed computing researchers like Lamport were considering models where e.g. up to 30% of nodes are compromised, that won't work on internet where an attacker can potentially simulate billions of fake nodes. Nakamoto consensus is really elegant as it combines Sybil protection, incentivization and consensus into one thing.
• tcgv 4y ago
  > I'm not planning to "buy" crypto; I would like to understand the technicalities. That's been my entrance into crypto as well. I really dislike the speculative, get-rich-quick, even casino like connotation crypto has (inevitably) acquired. It shades the incredible technology behind it. For a couple of years I have been studying and playing around with smart contracts in my free time, getting a better understanding of this paradigm (every smart contract can be seen as a singleton object "living" in the blockchain, with functions that are like API endpoints which you can interact with in a decentralized fashion), how it shapes applications built on top of it, and the possibilities ahead of us (ex: DeFi - Decentralized Finance). There's a lot of skepticism around crypto, like "it's a solution without a problem", but I don't buy it. Even if it were, it's a solution sophisticated, interesting enough, worth diving yourself into ;)
  • imtringued 4y ago
    The year of cryptocurrency is just as far away as the year of the linux desktop. I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm just saying that you will grow old while waiting for it.
• Tao3300 4y ago
  Really? I feel like the article explained most of the terms. I remember having a similar feeling when NFTs were getting big. It turned out that I did understand the terms, there just wasn't enough actually there, triggering a feeling that I must have been missing something despite my eyes telling me the emperor has no clothes.
  • imtringued 4y ago
    There is nothing new in cryptocurrency. The only real difference is the ability to flout the law. Having escape hatches is nice but glorifying the escape hatch of the week is odd.
• sanderjd 4y ago
  The technology side of all this is definitely interesting, but don't be fooled into thinking it's too interesting; you can read one guys book (the recommendations below are good) and understand how it works in enough detail. The basic idea is a series of data blobs with a cryptographic signature for each blob, with (importantly) the signature of the previous blob in the series included in the next blob. Then there is some distributed consensus mechanism (of which many have been devised) to come to consensus on which blob is canonically the next one in the series. Everything else is details or game theory.
• lawrenceyan 4y ago
  Given your background, you likely already understand all the individual components of how a blockchain like Ethereum functions, just disparately or in different contexts. I'd recommend just taking look at the documentation / code. Here's some sample ones: Ethereum - https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/ Solana - https://docs.solana.com/cluster/synchronization https://docs.solana.com/cluster/synchronization
• status200 4y ago
  Reading this will get you more informed than 90% of the commenters on this particular topic: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
• hartator 4y ago
  Most people don’t even read the original bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf In between a blog post and a book. I think it’s a good starting (and ending lol) point.
• anhner 4y ago
  don't worry, it's not "one of the largest technological events in the industry to date", they're just talking out of their ass
• emmelaich 4y ago
  Vitalik has a FAQ https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/12/31/pos_faq.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/12/31/pos_faq.html
• baby 4y ago
  I’ve started a podcast exactly for people like you: https://cryptologie.net/article/567/im-launching-a-podcast-two-and-a-half-coins/ https://cryptologie.net/article/567/im-launching-a-podcast-t... They are 20min episodes that build up to explain the foundations of cryptocurrencies. If you have any suggestions for future episode let me know. I’m thinking of spending a bit more episodes on Bitcoin to talk about bitcoin scripts, layer 2 apps, UTXOs, etc. Before talking about ethereum
• dmihal 4y ago
  You should check out the Zero Knowledge podcast (https://zeroknowledge.fm/ https://zeroknowledge.fm/) It's a crypto/blockchain podcast, but very technical, it's focused around the advanced technology that makes up the ecosystem (zero-knowledge cryptography, multi-party computation, consensus algorithms, miner-extractable value, new blockchain programming languages, etc). Very technical, almost nothing about investing. The downside, some episodes may be a bit hard to jump into due to the technical nature.