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> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still

> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still too busy doing other things, to voice any skepticism about blockchain-based solutions I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading. If anyone has a good resource for getting into the technical details of crypto please let me know. I would like to gain a full enough understanding that I can finally decide for myself if it's revolutionary or overhyped.

edwardbernays 1y ago
It's a revolutionary technology for the trustless, public exchange of data. It's overhyped as a financial instrument. Anybody who desires a completely public, completely trustless infrastructure for money or property is stupid.
antonvs 1y ago
Try asking an LLM about it. They're good for that kind of introduction, because they can respond appropriately to your level of knowledge. Just ask it to provide references so you can verify what it's saying. But in general, hallucinations aren't a big issue with those kinds of prompts.
lern_too_spel 1y ago
The article you're commenting on will tell you everything you need to know.
- willprice89 1y ago
  The article I'm commenting on is pretty clearly heavily biased against the entire field, possibly for good reason. I'd like to get my foundational understanding from a more neutral source so I can better consider the arguments put forth in TFA.
duskwuff 1y ago
> I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading. In some cases, this is by design. The project is nonsensical and/or a scam, and the white paper is an obfuscatory smokescreen to provide an illusion of sophistication.
- steve_adams_86 1y ago
  I feel like this describes so much of the tech industry. A lot of what we do might be sophisticated in some far corners, but at the end of the day the end results can be trivially explained. "Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc. Unfortunately with crypto, a lot of it is trivially explained as "obfuscated scam"
  - ipdashc 1y ago
    > "Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc. I don't think anyone ever claimed these were complicated or sophisticated, though? They're straightforward user-facing apps. A more comparable example might be cloud services or a good chunk of security products.
didibus 1y ago
It helped me to start from the problem it tries to solve. Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc. One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency. Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc. This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high. Now we have an idea of why we might want to make a digital currency. The biggest issue with making one is how do you solve the "double spend problem". That is, if I have 1 unit of a currency and I give it to you, how do we guarantee I no longer have that unit after it was given to you? In a physical world, I'm giving you the actual unit of currency, but in the digital world I'm giving you a copy of it, it would be easy for me to keep my copy as well and have an infinite money glitch. The solution to that is simple, you have a source of truth that processes the transaction. That source of truth records that I had 10$ and you had 10$, I gave you 1$, and now I have 9$ and you have 11$. That's easy enough. Here comes the second problem, who would trust owning that source of truth? Would you trust me keeping the official source of truth log of how much money everyone has? I could easily add myself a few 0s to my account, or remove some from yours. Would you trust the government of your country? Of another country? A big corporation? A US charity? This is where crypto comes in. Crypto says, nobody would ever trust a single entity, but what if everyone could join a network of nodes that together form the source of truth? Not owned by any single person, but the union of everyone who wants to join the network, and you could join the network, I could join it, anyone is free to join it, and we can all validate and check each other's work to make sure no one else on the network is fudging the numbers. And now a lot of complex cryptographic math comes in to from this network.
- thwarted 1y ago
  > When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc. While I'm sure some of this is true for some banks at some point in history, this is the kind of understanding of a given industry that results in TechBros reinventing buses or juicing machines. > This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high. The reason banking fees are so high is because they charge what the market will bear, and most of the banks customers are a captive audience. It doesn't cost $2 to perform a transaction at an ATM; it costs pennies, if that. Banks should be paying you for holding, and putting to use, your money.
knowaveragejoe 1y ago
To steelman the crypto side: I think the stuff that is most interesting is found _around_ crypto and not necessarily within most cryptocurrency projects. For example, there have been a lot of novel or interesting projects centered around cryptography, consensus, decentralization, anonyimity. On a sociological level, there are a lot of interesting social/economic experiments unfolding in the DeFi world as we speak. But I think that is where the truly interesting or valuable contributions to humanity as a whole end, and the vast, vast majority of it otherwise is just speculation or scams. It is hard to find that signal in the noise, but it is there, if you look.
- dpc050505 1y ago
  I had a great time using drugs friends bought on the silk road back in the day and I'd say that particular economic activity being facilitated by crypto while completely hedonistic was a net positive for humanity.
_9ptr 1y ago
To be fair, a lot of people don't understand the old money system either
- smsm42 1y ago
  In fact, there's probably less people who understand the old money system than those that understand the crypto math. After all, the latter can be readily learned from books and whitepapers, go figure where do you learn how actually the real monetary system works, in all its complexity, and how would you even get such level of access without being member of the Fed board.
  - troupo 1y ago
    Yes. Because no one has ever written any readily available books and white papers on old money.
    - smsm42 1y ago
      Tons of books, of course. But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works. If you read 20 financial books, I am not sure you'd understand how something like US money system really works.
      - troupo 1y ago
        > But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works. On technological level? Yes. On the bullshit scam level with sixteen layers of new invented terminology? Most likely not. And yes, cryptoworld is easier to understand precisely because it's unbelievably primitive once you pull apart hype, scams, and layers of indirection. Edit: oh, it's also busy re-inventing most of the concepts that the world has had for centuries, and most people understand without needing to read books and whitepapers
      - dpc050505 1y ago
        I'm 2/3 of the way through a degree in business admin with a minor in economics at a provincial university in Canada and I'd say I have a decent layman's understanding of the international monetary system. The place I'd look if I wanted a deeper understanding of how the fed operates would be reading the laws that govern banking.
smsm42 1y ago
"crypto" is a very wide word, there are a lot of technologies participating in the game, and a lot of technical details in them. Most are completely irrelevant to most regular people. Blockchain is pretty simple. There's a database, organized in a way that you can add records to it but you can not edit past records - or if you try to, everybody would know you did. There's a network of people maintaining this shared database, as a payment ledger - basically, this database for them says "X has $Y amount of database-money". People participating in maintaining this database get paid in the same database-money. They have incentive to do it properly, otherwise their database-money aren't worth shit. They also have incentive to steal if they could, but since they can't edit the database without other people noticing (who aren't interested in having db-money stolen from them) it's hard. That's the basic level of cryptocurrency systems, very shallowly and simplified, of course. If you want to know the math and protocols, there are full college degree programs dedicated to it (I am not kidding at all, there are). There's even free courses on Coursera and such which deal with the basics. The second level is allowing to do other, more complicated stuff with the same database. Like keep ownership records for other things (that's basically NFT). The next level is turning it from passive database into a computation engine, so you can make computations that will be reproducible over the database. That's ethereum contracts and such. There also side aspects - like privacy chains, where the information who owns the money is encrypted, so you can prove you own the money but somebody else would have hard time seeing how much you got and where it came from (it's usually very easy in most chains). Etc. etc. Whether it's revolutionary or overhyped - I have no idea. That's kinda societal question, certainly all the above (and more) can be useful and you can build useful stuff on top of it. Would some people use it? Probably. Will everybody switch to it from existing ways of doing things? I have no idea, but I suspect no. But I am nobody, so it's worth nothing. A lot of people smarter than me thought there's a use case for certain things, and spend a lot of time and money building stuff, and nobody every used it. Take Meta - the whole "metaverse" thing, nobody even remembers it now. There are many things like that. Is crypto one of them? I dunno. We'll see.
csomar 1y ago
Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas A. is the best book you can read on the subject.

edwardbernays 1y ago

It's a revolutionary technology for the trustless, public exchange of data. It's overhyped as a financial instrument. Anybody who desires a completely public, completely trustless infrastructure for money or property is stupid.

antonvs 1y ago

Try asking an LLM about it. They're good for that kind of introduction, because they can respond appropriately to your level of knowledge. Just ask it to provide references so you can verify what it's saying. But in general, hallucinations aren't a big issue with those kinds of prompts.

lern_too_spel 1y ago

The article you're commenting on will tell you everything you need to know.

willprice89 1y ago
The article I'm commenting on is pretty clearly heavily biased against the entire field, possibly for good reason. I'd like to get my foundational understanding from a more neutral source so I can better consider the arguments put forth in TFA.

duskwuff 1y ago

> I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading. In some cases, this is by design. The project is nonsensical and/or a scam, and the white paper is an obfuscatory smokescreen to provide an illusion of sophistication.

steve_adams_86 1y ago
I feel like this describes so much of the tech industry. A lot of what we do might be sophisticated in some far corners, but at the end of the day the end results can be trivially explained. "Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc. Unfortunately with crypto, a lot of it is trivially explained as "obfuscated scam"
- ipdashc 1y ago
  > "Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc. I don't think anyone ever claimed these were complicated or sophisticated, though? They're straightforward user-facing apps. A more comparable example might be cloud services or a good chunk of security products.

didibus 1y ago

It helped me to start from the problem it tries to solve. Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc. One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency. Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc. This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high. Now we have an idea of why we might want to make a digital currency. The biggest issue with making one is how do you solve the "double spend problem". That is, if I have 1 unit of a currency and I give it to you, how do we guarantee I no longer have that unit after it was given to you? In a physical world, I'm giving you the actual unit of currency, but in the digital world I'm giving you a copy of it, it would be easy for me to keep my copy as well and have an infinite money glitch. The solution to that is simple, you have a source of truth that processes the transaction. That source of truth records that I had 10$ and you had 10$, I gave you 1$, and now I have 9$ and you have 11$. That's easy enough. Here comes the second problem, who would trust owning that source of truth? Would you trust me keeping the official source of truth log of how much money everyone has? I could easily add myself a few 0s to my account, or remove some from yours. Would you trust the government of your country? Of another country? A big corporation? A US charity? This is where crypto comes in. Crypto says, nobody would ever trust a single entity, but what if everyone could join a network of nodes that together form the source of truth? Not owned by any single person, but the union of everyone who wants to join the network, and you could join the network, I could join it, anyone is free to join it, and we can all validate and check each other's work to make sure no one else on the network is fudging the numbers. And now a lot of complex cryptographic math comes in to from this network.

thwarted 1y ago
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc. While I'm sure some of this is true for some banks at some point in history, this is the kind of understanding of a given industry that results in TechBros reinventing buses or juicing machines. > This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high. The reason banking fees are so high is because they charge what the market will bear, and most of the banks customers are a captive audience. It doesn't cost $2 to perform a transaction at an ATM; it costs pennies, if that. Banks should be paying you for holding, and putting to use, your money.

knowaveragejoe 1y ago

To steelman the crypto side: I think the stuff that is most interesting is found _around_ crypto and not necessarily within most cryptocurrency projects. For example, there have been a lot of novel or interesting projects centered around cryptography, consensus, decentralization, anonyimity. On a sociological level, there are a lot of interesting social/economic experiments unfolding in the DeFi world as we speak. But I think that is where the truly interesting or valuable contributions to humanity as a whole end, and the vast, vast majority of it otherwise is just speculation or scams. It is hard to find that signal in the noise, but it is there, if you look.

dpc050505 1y ago
I had a great time using drugs friends bought on the silk road back in the day and I'd say that particular economic activity being facilitated by crypto while completely hedonistic was a net positive for humanity.

_9ptr 1y ago

To be fair, a lot of people don't understand the old money system either

smsm42 1y ago
In fact, there's probably less people who understand the old money system than those that understand the crypto math. After all, the latter can be readily learned from books and whitepapers, go figure where do you learn how actually the real monetary system works, in all its complexity, and how would you even get such level of access without being member of the Fed board.
- troupo 1y ago
  Yes. Because no one has ever written any readily available books and white papers on old money.
  - smsm42 1y ago
    Tons of books, of course. But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works. If you read 20 financial books, I am not sure you'd understand how something like US money system really works.
    - troupo 1y ago
      > But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works. On technological level? Yes. On the bullshit scam level with sixteen layers of new invented terminology? Most likely not. And yes, cryptoworld is easier to understand precisely because it's unbelievably primitive once you pull apart hype, scams, and layers of indirection. Edit: oh, it's also busy re-inventing most of the concepts that the world has had for centuries, and most people understand without needing to read books and whitepapers
    - dpc050505 1y ago
      I'm 2/3 of the way through a degree in business admin with a minor in economics at a provincial university in Canada and I'd say I have a decent layman's understanding of the international monetary system. The place I'd look if I wanted a deeper understanding of how the fed operates would be reading the laws that govern banking.

smsm42 1y ago

"crypto" is a very wide word, there are a lot of technologies participating in the game, and a lot of technical details in them. Most are completely irrelevant to most regular people. Blockchain is pretty simple. There's a database, organized in a way that you can add records to it but you can not edit past records - or if you try to, everybody would know you did. There's a network of people maintaining this shared database, as a payment ledger - basically, this database for them says "X has $Y amount of database-money". People participating in maintaining this database get paid in the same database-money. They have incentive to do it properly, otherwise their database-money aren't worth shit. They also have incentive to steal if they could, but since they can't edit the database without other people noticing (who aren't interested in having db-money stolen from them) it's hard. That's the basic level of cryptocurrency systems, very shallowly and simplified, of course. If you want to know the math and protocols, there are full college degree programs dedicated to it (I am not kidding at all, there are). There's even free courses on Coursera and such which deal with the basics. The second level is allowing to do other, more complicated stuff with the same database. Like keep ownership records for other things (that's basically NFT). The next level is turning it from passive database into a computation engine, so you can make computations that will be reproducible over the database. That's ethereum contracts and such. There also side aspects - like privacy chains, where the information who owns the money is encrypted, so you can prove you own the money but somebody else would have hard time seeing how much you got and where it came from (it's usually very easy in most chains). Etc. etc. Whether it's revolutionary or overhyped - I have no idea. That's kinda societal question, certainly all the above (and more) can be useful and you can build useful stuff on top of it. Would some people use it? Probably. Will everybody switch to it from existing ways of doing things? I have no idea, but I suspect no. But I am nobody, so it's worth nothing. A lot of people smarter than me thought there's a use case for certain things, and spend a lot of time and money building stuff, and nobody every used it. Take Meta - the whole "metaverse" thing, nobody even remembers it now. There are many things like that. Is crypto one of them? I dunno. We'll see.

csomar 1y ago

Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas A. is the best book you can read on the subject.