medium.md

Understanding Blockchain in a bit higher level than the beginner

An opinionated learning path for getting into speed with Blockchain (specially Ethereum).

Pre-requisites

Besides a programming background, this path assumes that the reader is at least a little comfortable with:

• Public key cryptography
  1. Watch Public Key Cryptography. (Est. time: 7 minutes)
• Digital signatures
  1. Read Cryptography Digital Signitures. (Est. time: 10 minutes)
  2. Watch What are Digital Signatures and How Do They Work? (Est. time: 3 minutes)
• Cryptographic hashing
  1. Watch What is Hashing on the Blockchain? (Est. time: 5 minutes)

Blockchain

1. Watch Blockchain - A visual demo. (Est. time: 18 minutes)

Bitcoin

1. Read How the Bitcoin protocol actually works. (Est. time: 45 minutes)
2. Watch this video (lighter than the previous article but useful to solidify your knowledge). (Est. time: 26 minutes)

Ethereum

Theory

1. Read How does Ethereum work, anyway? (Est. time: 38 minutes)
2. Read this article on smart contracts development. (Est. time: 15 minutes)
3. Read the Truffle Documentation / Hardhat Documentation
4. Read the Web3 Documentation / Ethers Documentation

Practice

1. Learn Ethereum development by making a Zombie Game (Est. time: 8 hs)
2. Read and make and example: Pet shop tutorial
3. Time-locked Wallets: An Introduction to Ethereum Smart Contracts
4. The Ultimate ENS and ĐApp Tutorial
5. Ultimate Introduction to Ethereum Ðapp Development (Est. time: 4 hs)
6. Ethernaut is a Web3/Solidity based wargame for those interested in learning ethereum

Concepts

0. Crypto vocabulary
1. Blockchain Oracles, Explained (Est. time: 4 minutes)
2. ABI (Est. time: 15 minutes)
3. Keccak256 (Est. time: 15 minutes)
4. Random numbers (Est. time: 5 minutes)
5. Velocity of Tokens (Est. time: 9 minutes)
6. Gas (Est. time: 5 minutes)
7. Weth
8. Decentralized Finance (DeFi):
   • Awesome Decentralized Finance
   • DeFi Prime - Curated directory of DeFi projects.

Under the hood

1. Inside an Ethereum transaction
2. Diving Into the Ethereum VM

Libraries

• dapp-bin - Ethereum repo providing implementations for many common data structures and utilities in Solidity, Serpent and LLL.
• Solidity Collections - Collections of code snippets and utility libraries.
• OpenZeppelin - Framework to build secure smart contracts.

Toolbox

General

• eth-cli - CLI tools.
• Remix - Online realtime compiler and runtime.
• Metamask - You can use it as a extension in your browser.

Audit

• SmartCheck - Online tool for checking smart contracts for vulnerabilities and bad practices.