Navigation
What is Blockchain Council?
So, the following discussion outlines a credible Blockchain Council review with a detailed focus on its capabilities and success stories. First of all, let us start the Blockchain Council review by outlining an introduction to the platform. According to the official website of Blockchain Council, it is an authoritative group of subject matter experts and blockchain enthusiasts. The primary objective of the platform is to increase awareness regarding blockchain research and development, use cases of blockchain technology, and the products and knowledge of the blockchain ecosystem.
Blockchain Council strongly affirms and believes in the fact that blockchain is beyond the margins of any common technology we encounter today. The platform provides an ideal environment for raising awareness regarding blockchain technology among developers, enterprises, and the general public for leveraging the maximum potential of blockchain technology. With the strength of more than members spanning across more than 90 countries, Blockchain Council is the de-facto private organization working specifically on developing blockchain technology worldwide.
Blockchain Council works on its mission of fostering blockchain education and research through a comprehensive focus on blockchain certifications. Any Blockchain Council review would be incomplete without the mention of blockchain certifications. The blockchain certifications offered by Blockchain Council are tailored specifically for helping individuals who aspire to build a career in blockchain.
Blockchain certifications on Blockchain Council help develop comprehensive knowledge regarding the core concepts evident in the blockchain landscape. At the same time, candidates can use the Blockchain Council certifications for building the foundation of lucrative careers in the field of blockchain. Interestingly, Blockchain Council certifications focus on different blockchain specializations, including smart contracts, Hyperledger, Quorum, and Corda.
Furthermore, the certifications of Blockchain Council also emphasize the applications of blockchain in industries such as digital marketing, healthcare, supply chain, and others. Most important of all, Blockchain Council offers tailored training programs for ensuring the success of candidates in its certification exams. The Certified Blockchain Expert or CBE certification program by Blockchain Council features a comprehensive training program tailored specifically for the certification exam.
The certification training course helps in developing a profound understanding of blockchain technology. The training course could also help in building skills for developing blockchain-centric applications for businesses. Interestingly, the orientation of fundamental topics covered in this certification training course turns towards the difference of blockchain from conventional technologies.
Also, candidates could get the opportunity to learn about consensus mechanisms and blockchain terminology. Furthermore, the certification also focuses on different enterprise blockchain platforms used by developers such as Ethereum, Corda, Stellar, and Hyperledger. The most striking topic covered in the Certified Blockchain Developer certification by Blockchain Council is multichain.
The certification training course helps in developing a comprehensive understanding and exposure to the blockchain landscape. The training course with Certified Blockchain Architect certification improves the capabilities of candidates for leveraging their expertise to round up on critical decisions regarding blockchain projects.
Candidates can also develop expertise for designing guidelines and structure for the blockchain system according to system requirements. The mechanics of the system is merely the top layer. Stylianos Kampakis , CEO of The Tesseract Academy, points out that blockchain education requires a bit more forethought than simply how you want to apply it. Right now there are multiple competing blockchains and frameworks, some of which support established languages e. I would look towards free courses.
If someone is already proficient at writing code, learning to code blockchain is not difficult. Engage in coding forums on web sites such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, or run local Meetups to share and help other developers to get into the domain.
Your engagement will not only sharpen your skill sets, but it brings visibility from potential employers seeking such skills, and doors will open for you for more rewarding opportunities. Professional associations, such as ISACA, also publish white papers, books, journal articles and blog content around the latest developments in blockchain that can be helpful as part of your continuing education. As with financial services, the size of the market cap offers insights to the demands for various technical skills that typically support these industries.
Though the programming toolchain will improve to make these exact attacks harder, they were ultimately all due to programmer error. There are also many subtler bugs that arise from smart contract programming, such as in frontrunning or secure generation of randomness. As a smart contract developer, you must treat security as paramount. That means any code that handles significant flows of money should be run through static analyzers like Oyente or Securify , tested thoroughly, and then audited by an experienced smart contract auditor.
To strengthen your security chops, I recommend working through The Ethernaut by OpenZeppelin, a game where you find and attack vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Many of them have you replicate real attacks against smart contracts that have occurred in the wild.
Phil Daian also has an excellent set of smart contract hacking challenges called Hack This Contract. Expect to revisit this document many times over in your smart contract programming career. The bibliography is also worth exploring for further reading by security experts. Most developers recommend VSCode or Atom for your text editor, since they have decent Solidity plugins.
Now is a good time to look into IPFS , which you can use as a fully decentralized filestore at much cheaper cost than the Ethereum blockchain. Once you have your full Web3 stack set up, try deploying an end-to-end Dapp decentralized application. This tutorial provides a nice full-stack overview using Node and Postgres for the backend, and this tutorial will show you how to create a fully decentralized application, using IPFS as your persistence layer.
First, start building your own projects. OpenZeppelin might be a good place to start for smart contracts. Get on their Slack or Rocketchat — the devs are usually readily accessible. Beyond open source contributions, there are also many blockchain hackathons constantly popping up.
Wherever it is, find your people and continue learning. The best way to really understand the blockchain world is to immerse yourself in it. The three fantastic podcasts I recommend are the Software Engineering Daily Blockchain interviews , which provide good technical intros to many topics and cryptocurrencies. Another interesting up-and-coming technical podcast is Conspiratus. Subscribe to the Ethereum Foundation and watch Devcon3 presentations. Blockchain at Berkeley records many of their lectures, most of which are excellent technical overviews.
Decypher Media also posts talks, whitepaper reviews, and tutorials. Jackson Palmer has engaging weekly overviews, these are on the less technical side but very evenly presented.
For realtime blockchain chatter, it lives mostly in two places: Reddit, and Twitter. For Reddit, most subreddits are very low quality and dominated by noise. Most subreddits though are primarily dominated by speculators, and are not a good use of your attention.
Stay away from Bitcoin-related subreddits. Bitcoin notoriously has one of the most toxic communities, and Reddit only magnifies that. Twitter is more of a mixed bag. For better or for worse, most blockchain people live on Twitter.
Blockchain Twitter was somewhat of a mystery to me at first, but eventually I developed an informal ontology of Twitter blockchain people. Entrepreneurs can be okay, though they mostly act as hype men or tweet about their own projects. Pay the most attention to the builders.
A few representatives from each category do a breadth-first search of who these people follow if you want to fill out your Twitter feed :. All that said, I recommend minimizing your exposure to Twitter and Reddit. Important information will bubble up to you asynchronously. I recommend subscribing to Inside Bitcoin for daily digests of the most important crypto news pieces it covers more than just Bitcoin.
For token projects, Token Economy has excellent weekly writeups, and Week in Ethereum has good digests of developer-focused happenings in the Ethereum ecosystem. Focus on building stuff and learning. Long-form content tends to be the best bang for the buck. I recommend following these:. If you want a more structured approach to learning this material, there are a few high-quality books and courses out there and a lot of low-quality ones.
The best overall textbook for blockchains is Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies which accompanies the Princeton Coursera course.
If you want a more structured approach to learning this material, there are a few high-quality courses out there and a lot of low-quality ones.
As I said before, blockchain startups are hiring like crazy. AngelList did a great writeup on how to get a job in the crypto space. The job aggregators are more global though. Most blockchain teams are willing to hire remote for the right talent. Many devs are readily accessible on Twitter, Github, or on their public Slack channels. If you have a solid portfolio and can demonstrate technical chops, most people will be impressed if you show some initiative. Cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy, and I really believe the is the most rapidly evolving space you can be working in.
If this article was helpful, tweet it. Learn to code for free. Get started. Forum Donate. This guide will proceed in ten parts: Why should you learn blockchain development? Prerequisites The theoretical foundations of Bitcoin Building a blockchain yourself Ethereum and smart contract programming Smart contract security Taking off the training wheels Building your own projects Navigating the blockchain community Getting a job Why should you learn blockchain development? Much of the innovation is happening outside of academia.
The demand for talent far, far exceeds supply.
Just start your Blockchain Training in Noida today to get the most out of it. Is It Worth Learning Blockchain? All Blogs. Drop us a query. I am Human. Recent Posts Which is the best android development course? What is the certification cost of office ? How much does it cost to get salesforce certified? Why do we need a workday? Why pega software is used in customer relationship management?
If I stuck anywhere they gave me best solution of my Queries. Enviornment is so good for learning purpose. Thanks to chroma campus. Read More Read Less. Benedette N. You have done a wonderful job. I look forward to attending a future training. View More. Call Us.
Ask a Demo. Get a Call Back. Apply as a Trainer. Though blockchain has now existed for more than a decade, blockchain is still early in the adoption curve. Even if you are a non - technical person , you can start to learn today. Beginning to learn about blockchain technology today is similar to learning web development in the late 90s. According to BurningGlass, there were only a few jobs in but the number grew to 1, job postings in The year saw more growth with 3, job postings.
LinkedIn has a listing of 4, blockchain -related jobs. Once an expert, you could do the following: Start your own Bitcoin or Blockchain related startup. Start a consulting or software company on Bitcoin or Blockchain. Write a book on Bitcoin or Blockchain. By definition, a blockchain is a distributed, decentralized, immutable database used to store encrypted data. In its purest form, AI is used to describe the theory and practice of creating machines capable of carrying out tasks that require intelligence.
Artificial intelligence refers to machines that are built to perform intelligent tasks that have traditionally been accomplished by humans. Blockchain is a decentralized network of computers that records and stores data to display a chronological series of events on a transparent and immutable ledger system. The whole point of using a blockchain is to let people—in particular, people who don't trust one another—share valuable data in a secure , tamperproof way.
That's because blockchains store data using sophisticated math and innovative software rules that are extremely difficult for attackers to manipulate. Blockchain technology is revolutionizing the data storage industry. Blockchain technology uses encryption and distributed ledgers to store and transmit data anonymously.
When this technology is combined with artificial intelligence , machine learning is heightened to a new level that we've never seen before. A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, and oftentimes public, digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that any involved record cannot be altered retroactively, without the alteration of all subsequent blocks.
Is it worth to learn Blockchain? Category: technology and computing internet for beginners. Learning blockchain and Studying the underlying fields that gave birth to blockchain technology will definitely be worth your time. Blockchain is a niche subject with a lot of jargon surrounding it, if you don't have the time to take a university course, there are other ways to increase your knowledge and expertise.
Is Blockchain the future? What is Blockchain developer salary? Does Blockchain require programming? How do I start learning Blockchain? How long does it take to learn Blockchain? The Open University published a paper in December , proposing appropriating the blockchain technology for developing online learning approaches [2].
The paper entails various out of the box concepts that can facilitate the deployment of Bitcoin blockchain technology in many online learning and development protocols.
As stated by the author, smart contracts can be helpful to change P2P aid to make it more focused towards personal development, instead of monetary transactions. In other words, we can say that blockchain learning revolves around decentralizing learning contracts. The blockchain technology can be utilized both for personal development and managing the educational cost. The paper proposed that if learning market is decentralized during establishing a unit for measuring learning accomplishments, the blockchain may be utilized to make an autonomous educational exchange method.
For this to happen, smart contracts need to be developed for giving the backbone of the exchange. Accordingly, if we begin thinking of learning and development as an educational currency, we can start to make more proper modes of communication with the learners [3].
For instance, an instructor or trainer can develop inspirational learning chunks and position these as blocks on the blockchain through mining-like mechanism which would be discovered and expanded by the learners. Following are some of the other ways blockchain technology is bringing a change in learning and development. The learning history and scholastic achievements of the students can be saved on a blockchain ledger by using smart contracts [4].
The history of the educational and personal development of students can be available on the public ledger that everyone can see. This learning timeline can be used for projecting upcoming plans in accordance to learning history of the students. The blockchain can be used as a way of P2P data exchange medium which rewards students who share information and contribute towards their education and development institution.
Such concept can bring two advantages [5] :. In conclusion, it can be inferred that blockchain is not just a financial innovation and Bitcoin is not just a currency, rather it is one of the most viable innovations created in last years. Applying the blockchain technology in online learning and development and distance learning, educational process can be improved with cost efficiency.
Blockchain Council Review – Is It Worth It?
But without a doubt, cryptocurrencies are one of the most innovative areas you can be working in right now. So build something no one else knows how to build. If you succeed in building the future of decentralized technology, the world will reward you handsomely. Blockchains are built atop decades of research in computer science, cryptography, and economics.
Satoshi Nakamoto was a renegade, but he also knew well the history that preceded him. It helps to have built them from scratch to better understand how they work and their properties. Cryptography is the namesake and bedrock of cryptocurrencies. The other important cryptographic primitive is the cryptographic hash function.
These can be used to construct commitment schemes , and are the building block for Merkle trees. Merkle trees enable Merkle proofs , one of the key optimizations that blockchains use for scalability. Distributed systems are absolutely essential to reasoning about blockchains, so you must build a foundation here before tackling blockchain programming. Know the difficulties of reasoning about time in a distributed system.
Appreciate the tradeoffs between safety and liveness. PBFT is the basis for many non-proof-of-work blockchain consensus algorithms. Learn about sharding such as via consistent hashing , leader-follower replication , and quorum-based commits.
The decentralization of blockchains derives in large part from their peer-to-peer network topology. As such, blockchains are direct descendants of the past P2P networks. To understand the blockchain communication model, you need to understand the basics of computer networking : this means understanding TCP vs UDP , the packet model, what IP packets look like , and roughly how Internet routing works. Public blockchains tend to spread messages via gossip protocols using flooding.
Blockchains have their own place, but they draw upon the lessons of these networks and how they were designed. Cryptocurrencies are inherently multidisciplinary — this is part of what makes them so fascinating and radical.
Besides computer science, cryptography, and networking, they are also deeply interwoven with economics. Cryptocurrencies can derive many security properties through their economic structures, which is often termed cryptoeconomics. As such, economics is essential to understanding cryptocurrencies. The most important branch of economics that plays into cryptocurrencies is game theory , the study of payoffs and incentives among multiple agents.
Two key concepts in your repertoire should be Nash equilibria and Schelling points , as they feature prominently in cryptoeconomic analysis. Cryptocurrencies are not just protocols, they are also forms of money. As such, they respond to the laws of macroeconomics if they can be called laws. Cryptocurrencies are subject to different monetary policies , and respond predictably to inflation and deflation.
You should understand these processes and the effects they have on spending, saving, etc. Another valuable economic concept is the velocity of money , especially as it corresponds to valuing a currency. Cryptocurrencies are also deeply interwoven with markets, which requires an understanding of microeconomics. For many coin distributions and cryptoeconomic systems, auction theory features prominently. If you are, feel free to skim or skip over them entirely. In October of , Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper in which he described a protocol for a decentralized digital currency.
He called this protocol Bitcoin. First, I recommend building your intuitions about proof-of-work and the fork choice rule also known as Nakamoto consensus. Start here:. Here are some good resources. Source and slides here. There are also other blockchain implementations you can find, written in various programming languages. You should also by now have enough background that you should be able to read and understand the original Bitcoin whitepaper.
To understand the economics and mechanics of Bitcoin mining, I recommend watching the lecture on Bitcoin mining in the Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies Princeton course. You should also be able to play around with a Bitcoin block explorer and navigate raw Bitcoin transactions. Now is a good time to study up on the history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The below video, offered by a UC Berkeley Decal, gives a good overview. You understand how blockchains and proof-of-work can achieve distributed, Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus within a peer-to-peer network.
But a payments network is just one application you can run atop such a blockchain. In , Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum asked: what if you used a blockchain to implement a decentralized computer?
In Ethereum, you pay miners to execute your programs on this distributed virtual machine. This means you can perform arbitrary computations, using a Turing-complete programming language unlike Bitcoin script.
This brings us to smart contracts — the name for programs that run on such a virtual machine. In other words, you can create financial contracts that automatically enforce themselves. Ethereum has enabled the wave of ICOs and developers building atop the blockchain. It is the second largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, it has more than 10x the developers of the next most popular platform, it has the strongest developer team, the most mature tooling, and the majority of ICOs and projects atop it.
It also has the most industry support , which goes a long way. The ideas behind Ethereum have also spawned a wave of innovation in cryptoeconomics. You should dip your toes into the ideas around DAOs , and all of the sci-fi fever dreams that they hint at. As with any technology, the best way to get acquainted with Ethereum is by building a few small projects.
The dominant programming language for Ethereum is Solidity, which is a statically typed JavaScript-esque language. To get your first exposure to Solidity development, I recommend working through all of the CryptoZombies tutorial. I recommend this guide as a first tutorial to walk you through the process. This tutorial does a good job of walking you through an end-to-end blockchain stack and explaining the pieces as they go along.
Karl Floersch has a great tutorial where he walks through how to build a secure commit-reveal voting system. Great, now for your mid-term exam: build a secure coin toss game, where two players can securely bet on the coin flip. No tutorial this time, do it on your own. Think about possible attacks — how can the players cheat? Can you ensure that they play honestly? Here are some hints. Security is absolutely essential to blockchain development. Smart contracts have been plagued by disastrous hacks, including the DAO hack , the Parity Wallet hack , and the affectionately named Parity Wallet hack 2 now with its own T-shirt.
The truth is, smart contracts are extremely hard to get right. Though the programming toolchain will improve to make these exact attacks harder, they were ultimately all due to programmer error. There are also many subtler bugs that arise from smart contract programming, such as in frontrunning or secure generation of randomness. As a smart contract developer, you must treat security as paramount. That means any code that handles significant flows of money should be run through static analyzers like Oyente or Securify , tested thoroughly, and then audited by an experienced smart contract auditor.
To strengthen your security chops, I recommend working through The Ethernaut by OpenZeppelin, a game where you find and attack vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Many of them have you replicate real attacks against smart contracts that have occurred in the wild.
Phil Daian also has an excellent set of smart contract hacking challenges called Hack This Contract. Expect to revisit this document many times over in your smart contract programming career. The bibliography is also worth exploring for further reading by security experts. Most developers recommend VSCode or Atom for your text editor, since they have decent Solidity plugins.
Now is a good time to look into IPFS , which you can use as a fully decentralized filestore at much cheaper cost than the Ethereum blockchain. Once you have your full Web3 stack set up, try deploying an end-to-end Dapp decentralized application. This tutorial provides a nice full-stack overview using Node and Postgres for the backend, and this tutorial will show you how to create a fully decentralized application, using IPFS as your persistence layer.
First, start building your own projects. OpenZeppelin might be a good place to start for smart contracts. Get on their Slack or Rocketchat — the devs are usually readily accessible. Beyond open source contributions, there are also many blockchain hackathons constantly popping up.
Wherever it is, find your people and continue learning. The best way to really understand the blockchain world is to immerse yourself in it. Though blockchain has now existed for more than a decade, blockchain is still early in the adoption curve. Even if you are a non - technical person , you can start to learn today. Beginning to learn about blockchain technology today is similar to learning web development in the late 90s. According to BurningGlass, there were only a few jobs in but the number grew to 1, job postings in The year saw more growth with 3, job postings.
LinkedIn has a listing of 4, blockchain -related jobs. Once an expert, you could do the following: Start your own Bitcoin or Blockchain related startup.
Start a consulting or software company on Bitcoin or Blockchain. Write a book on Bitcoin or Blockchain. By definition, a blockchain is a distributed, decentralized, immutable database used to store encrypted data.
In its purest form, AI is used to describe the theory and practice of creating machines capable of carrying out tasks that require intelligence. Artificial intelligence refers to machines that are built to perform intelligent tasks that have traditionally been accomplished by humans.
Blockchain is a decentralized network of computers that records and stores data to display a chronological series of events on a transparent and immutable ledger system. The whole point of using a blockchain is to let people—in particular, people who don't trust one another—share valuable data in a secure , tamperproof way.
That's because blockchains store data using sophisticated math and innovative software rules that are extremely difficult for attackers to manipulate. Blockchain technology is revolutionizing the data storage industry. Blockchain technology uses encryption and distributed ledgers to store and transmit data anonymously. When this technology is combined with artificial intelligence , machine learning is heightened to a new level that we've never seen before. A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, and oftentimes public, digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that any involved record cannot be altered retroactively, without the alteration of all subsequent blocks.
Is it worth to learn Blockchain? Category: technology and computing internet for beginners. Learning blockchain and Studying the underlying fields that gave birth to blockchain technology will definitely be worth your time. Blockchain is a niche subject with a lot of jargon surrounding it, if you don't have the time to take a university course, there are other ways to increase your knowledge and expertise. Is Blockchain the future? What is Blockchain developer salary?
Does Blockchain require programming? How do I start learning Blockchain? How long does it take to learn Blockchain? Learning resources. Why is Blockchain expensive? Technology Cost. Is Python good for Blockchain? Why do we need Blockchain? How do I get a job in Blockchain?
Can non technical people learn Blockchain? How many Blockchain jobs are there? How do you become an expert in Blockchain? Once an expert, you could do the following:.
Start your own Bitcoin or Blockchain related startup. Is Blockchain considered AI? Is Blockchain artificial intelligence? How safe is Blockchain? How Blockchain and artificial intelligence is transforming industries?
How Blockchain is changing Learning & Development
Why do we need a workday? The learning history and scholastic achievements of the students can be saved on a blockchain ledger by using smart contracts [4]. Interestingly, the orientation of fundamental topics covered in this certification training course turns towards the difference of blockchain from conventional development. If the conditions of a smart contract are not met, then the transaction will not happen. Drop us a query. Croma Campus Blockchain Behaviour: 1 worth 3 learning 5.
Recent Posts
There are also other blockchain implementations worth can find, written in various programming languages. One last point: there are development lot of general purpose contracts that you should never write yourself, except for educational purposes, is it worth learning blockchain development. It became NEO in Along with this, the technology has numerous other offerings if you are eager to learn it effectively. We predict that, post-COVID and the online learning boom, business leaders will blockchain expected to provide increasing amounts of training — either feeding learning new thirst for continuous online education, or countering the looming threat of recession and redundancies. It is the second largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, it has more than 10x the developers of the next most popular platform, it has the strongest developer team, the most mature tooling, and the majority of ICOs and projects atop it.
Blockchain Development Guide for 2020 Complete Roadmap
Like so many knowledge quests, there are plenty of avenues to your final destination. These two technologies underlie all blockchain platforms, though each uses different algorithms. Both will give a kind of grounding. While it is not important to learn the specifics of any algorithm, but concepts like the web-of-trust, how cryptographic hashes protect data, and key hygiene are the ones necessary for blockchain.
It can be hard to learn, depending on your level of experience. If you have taken some computer science courses, then it will be a lot easier. It becomes an endless stream of other related subjects and knowledge that you can learn. The mechanics of the system is merely the top layer. Stylianos Kampakis , CEO of The Tesseract Academy, points out that blockchain education requires a bit more forethought than simply how you want to apply it. Right now there are multiple competing blockchains and frameworks, some of which support established languages e.
I would look towards free courses. If someone is already proficient at writing code, learning to code blockchain is not difficult. Engage in coding forums on web sites such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, or run local Meetups to share and help other developers to get into the domain. Your engagement will not only sharpen your skill sets, but it brings visibility from potential employers seeking such skills, and doors will open for you for more rewarding opportunities. All it takes is rolling up your sleeves and jumping into the fray.
Everyone is competing to hire blockchain talent, and projects are feeling the talent crunch. Where else can you build sci-fi stuff like cryptographically secured, decentralized money? The space could use more transparency, and regulation will eventually come. But without a doubt, cryptocurrencies are one of the most innovative areas you can be working in right now.
So build something no one else knows how to build. If you succeed in building the future of decentralized technology, the world will reward you handsomely. Blockchains are built atop decades of research in computer science, cryptography, and economics. Satoshi Nakamoto was a renegade, but he also knew well the history that preceded him.
It helps to have built them from scratch to better understand how they work and their properties. Cryptography is the namesake and bedrock of cryptocurrencies. The other important cryptographic primitive is the cryptographic hash function. These can be used to construct commitment schemes , and are the building block for Merkle trees. Merkle trees enable Merkle proofs , one of the key optimizations that blockchains use for scalability.
Distributed systems are absolutely essential to reasoning about blockchains, so you must build a foundation here before tackling blockchain programming.
Know the difficulties of reasoning about time in a distributed system. Appreciate the tradeoffs between safety and liveness. PBFT is the basis for many non-proof-of-work blockchain consensus algorithms. Learn about sharding such as via consistent hashing , leader-follower replication , and quorum-based commits. The decentralization of blockchains derives in large part from their peer-to-peer network topology. As such, blockchains are direct descendants of the past P2P networks. To understand the blockchain communication model, you need to understand the basics of computer networking : this means understanding TCP vs UDP , the packet model, what IP packets look like , and roughly how Internet routing works.
Public blockchains tend to spread messages via gossip protocols using flooding. Blockchains have their own place, but they draw upon the lessons of these networks and how they were designed.
Cryptocurrencies are inherently multidisciplinary — this is part of what makes them so fascinating and radical. Besides computer science, cryptography, and networking, they are also deeply interwoven with economics. Cryptocurrencies can derive many security properties through their economic structures, which is often termed cryptoeconomics. As such, economics is essential to understanding cryptocurrencies. The most important branch of economics that plays into cryptocurrencies is game theory , the study of payoffs and incentives among multiple agents.
Two key concepts in your repertoire should be Nash equilibria and Schelling points , as they feature prominently in cryptoeconomic analysis. Cryptocurrencies are not just protocols, they are also forms of money. As such, they respond to the laws of macroeconomics if they can be called laws. Cryptocurrencies are subject to different monetary policies , and respond predictably to inflation and deflation. You should understand these processes and the effects they have on spending, saving, etc.
Another valuable economic concept is the velocity of money , especially as it corresponds to valuing a currency. Cryptocurrencies are also deeply interwoven with markets, which requires an understanding of microeconomics.
For many coin distributions and cryptoeconomic systems, auction theory features prominently. If you are, feel free to skim or skip over them entirely. In October of , Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper in which he described a protocol for a decentralized digital currency. He called this protocol Bitcoin. First, I recommend building your intuitions about proof-of-work and the fork choice rule also known as Nakamoto consensus.
Start here:. Here are some good resources. Source and slides here. There are also other blockchain implementations you can find, written in various programming languages.
You should also by now have enough background that you should be able to read and understand the original Bitcoin whitepaper.
To understand the economics and mechanics of Bitcoin mining, I recommend watching the lecture on Bitcoin mining in the Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies Princeton course.
You should also be able to play around with a Bitcoin block explorer and navigate raw Bitcoin transactions. Now is a good time to study up on the history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The below video, offered by a UC Berkeley Decal, gives a good overview. You understand how blockchains and proof-of-work can achieve distributed, Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus within a peer-to-peer network. But a payments network is just one application you can run atop such a blockchain.
In , Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum asked: what if you used a blockchain to implement a decentralized computer? In Ethereum, you pay miners to execute your programs on this distributed virtual machine. This means you can perform arbitrary computations, using a Turing-complete programming language unlike Bitcoin script.
This brings us to smart contracts — the name for programs that run on such a virtual machine. In other words, you can create financial contracts that automatically enforce themselves. Ethereum has enabled the wave of ICOs and developers building atop the blockchain. It is the second largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, it has more than 10x the developers of the next most popular platform, it has the strongest developer team, the most mature tooling, and the majority of ICOs and projects atop it.
It also has the most industry support , which goes a long way. The ideas behind Ethereum have also spawned a wave of innovation in cryptoeconomics. You should dip your toes into the ideas around DAOs , and all of the sci-fi fever dreams that they hint at. As with any technology, the best way to get acquainted with Ethereum is by building a few small projects.
The dominant programming language for Ethereum is Solidity, which is a statically typed JavaScript-esque language. To get your first exposure to Solidity development, I recommend working through all of the CryptoZombies tutorial.
I recommend this guide as a first tutorial to walk you through the process. This tutorial does a good job of walking you through an end-to-end blockchain stack and explaining the pieces as they go along.
Karl Floersch has a great tutorial where he walks through how to build a secure commit-reveal voting system. Great, now for your mid-term exam: build a secure coin toss game, where two players can securely bet on the coin flip.
No tutorial this time, do it on your own. Think about possible attacks — how can the players cheat? Can you ensure that they play honestly? Here are some hints.
Security is absolutely essential to blockchain development. Smart contracts have been plagued by disastrous hacks, including the DAO hack , the Parity Wallet hack , and the affectionately named Parity Wallet hack 2 now with its own T-shirt. The truth is, smart contracts are extremely hard to get right.
Though the programming toolchain will improve to make these exact attacks harder, they were ultimately all due to programmer error. There are also many subtler bugs that arise from smart contract programming, such as in frontrunning or secure generation of randomness. As a smart contract developer, you must treat security as paramount. That means any code that handles significant flows of money should be run through static analyzers like Oyente or Securify , tested thoroughly, and then audited by an experienced smart contract auditor.
To strengthen your security chops, I recommend working through The Ethernaut by OpenZeppelin, a game where you find and attack vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Many of them have you replicate real attacks against smart contracts that have occurred in the wild.
Phil Daian also has an excellent set of smart contract hacking challenges called Hack This Contract. Expect to revisit this document many times over in your smart contract programming career. The bibliography is also worth exploring for further reading by security experts. Most developers recommend VSCode or Atom for your text editor, since they have decent Solidity plugins.
Now is a good time to look into IPFS , which you can use as a fully decentralized filestore at much cheaper cost than the Ethereum blockchain.
Once you have your full Web3 stack set up, try deploying an end-to-end Dapp decentralized application. This tutorial provides a nice full-stack overview using Node and Postgres for the backend, and this tutorial will show you how to create a fully decentralized application, using IPFS as your persistence layer. First, start building your own projects. OpenZeppelin might be a good place to start for smart contracts.