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"Wake up, Neo..." - The Matrix (1999)
You are reading this because you are a smart and curious person looking to learn more about crypto but don't really know where to begin. Perhaps you were sent here by a friend who is further down the rabbit hole than you, or you found your way here all on your own. In either case, welcome.
You've googled the buzzwords, perhaps watched a video or two about crypto, but so far things haven't really clicked. Yet you can feel that something important is happening.
I've compiled this document to hopefully serve you as a roadmap and guide. I won't be writing too much of it myself — there are far smarter people who already articulated these concepts much better than I ever could. I plan to simply compile all the best sources in a single place that is easy to parse through and share with others.
This is an ever-evolving aggregation of links, videos, articles, explainers, etc. Crypto is a moving target — I will try and keep this up to date as much as possible, but ideally after learning the foundations you will be informed enough to be able to take ownership of your own journey.
A warning: the rabbit hole is extremely deep, possibly endless. And once it hits, it's hard to think of anything else. Good luck.
Before starting, I believe it's important to understand the historical context that motivated the idea of blockchains and eventually gave birth to Bitcoin (the first cryptocurrency). The following three articles, when read in order, do a great job at painting the initial picture that will inform everything else:
An important concept to have a basic understanding of is a blockchain. Here are a few good breakdowns of what a blockchain is, how it works, etc. Don't worry if this doesn't completely make sense — you should be good for now if you just grasp it at a high level.
Just like you have an email account with Google, you can have an "account" in the blockchain, which is referred to as a wallet. They are called wallets because they store your (digital) money. Like your email account, your wallet consists of a public address (email address) that everyone knows, and a private key (password) that only you know. In the blockchain, an address is usually a long string of random letters and numbers. It usually looks like this:
On the other hand, your private key is 12 random words, as it is very secure and still easy to store. A private key (or sometimes called 'seed phrase') looks like this:
Private keys are extremely sensitive information because anyone who has access to it can steal all your funds, in the same way a hacker with your email and password might be able able to steal your information. This is why people usually write the private key on a piece of paper and then store it safely, instead of keeping it in their computers or phones digitally where it could be potentially hacked.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and is currently the largest one by total market capitalization, collectively worth over $1 trillion as of 2021.
Bitcoin is the world’s first completely open payment network which anyone with an internet connection can participate in. Bitcoin was designed to be used on the internet, and doesn’t depend on banks or private companies to process transactions.
Similar to how a bank tracks assets, Bitcoin tracks who owns what using a blockchain. What sets the Bitcoin blockchain apart from a bank's ledger is that it is decentralized, meaning anyone can view it and no single entity controls it.
Understanding Bitcoin is key to understanding the rest of crypto, since all other cryptocurrencies share many of the foundational aspects of Bitcoin. Here are a few articles that best motivate Bitcoin, explain how it works and why it is important.
After Bitcoin was launched, people starting thinking of many other uses for blockchains besides just as a store of value. One of those people was Vitalik Buterin, a teenager in Canada who together with a team of collaborators came up with the idea of a multi-purpose blockchain called Ethereum.
Ethereum was designed to let anyone build arbitrary applications on the blockchain — if it can be written in code, it can be built on Ethereum. Because of this, Ethereum is often referred to as the World Computer.