Crypto
"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust." - Satoshi Nakamoto
Learn about Bitcoin in under an hour
In one sentence: Bitcoin is censorship resistance value transfer.
In 6 minutes: Bitcoin Properly (video).
In ~25 minutes: Ever wonder how bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) actually work? by 3Blue1BrownN or The Trust Machine: The Story of Bitcoin by Art of the Problem
Read the Bitcoin whitepaper (same but annotated). It's quite short (skip the calculations) and you'll know the principles of Bitcoin.
That's it. Now comes the tough part. You have to read more. Everyday.
Some resources to get you started
Why Bitcoin Matters by Marc Andreesen
“The practical consequence of solving this problem is that Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.”
"Imagine you are sitting in a bunker. You have no idea what people are out there and what are their intentions. You only receive some incoming messages from strangers that may contain anything. They can be just random garbage or deliberately crafted messages to confuse you or lie to you. You never know. You cannot trust anyone. The problem of "money" or any other "social contract" is that everyone should be able to know what the majority agrees to without trusting some intermediaries (otherwise they can easily obuse their special position)."
anything by Nick Szabo, start with: Money, blockchains, and social scalability, The dawn of trustworthy computing, Shelling Out: The Origins of Money
"the secret to Bitcoin’s success is that its prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability is buying something even more valuable: social scalability. Social scalability is the ability of an institution –- a relationship or shared endeavor, in which multiple people repeatedly participate, and featuring customs, rules, or other features which constrain or motivate participants’ behaviors — to overcome shortcomings in human minds and in the motivating or constraining aspects of said institution that limit who or how many can successfully participate."
Hyperbitcoinization and Appcoins Are Snake Oil by Daniel Krawisz
The Bullish Case for Bitcoin by Vijay Boyapati
"Owning bitcoins is one of the few asymmetric bets that people across the entire world can participate in. Much like a call option, an investor’s downside is limited to 1x, while their potential upside is still 100x or more. Bitcoin is the first truly global bubble whose size and scope is limited only by the desire of the world’s citizenry to protect their savings from the vagaries of government economic mismanagement."
Why It’s Hard to “Get” Bitcoin: The Blockchain Spectrum by Dhruv Bansal
"A blockchain is a distributed system using cryptography to secure an evolving consensus about an economically valuable token."
Other great crypto resources
Bitcoin Resources by Jameson Loop.
Crypto Canon by a16z
Blockchain demo - a visual demo of blockchain technology.
Coin demo - a cryptocurrency demo.
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