I was getting started with cryptocurrency in 2012 when I first heard about Bitcoin. I didn’t “get it.”

Terms like decentralized, distributed and disintermediation piqued my interest, but I lacked the technical understanding to really understand what I was looking at. I needed a class in cryptocurrency 101, some help getting started with cryptocurrency.

I started reading up in 2015, wading through a sea of information.

At this point I’ve read a few books and hundreds of articles and academic papers about cryptocurrency and how the blockchain works in one form or another so I wanted to put together a short list of resources for understanding the basics of how the technology works and what the implications are as quickly as possible for non-technical people. Basically, This is the list I wish someone sent me two months ago.

I’ve arranged this list of cryptocurrency 101 resources in the rough order I would recommend reading the articles.

It starts with a high-level overview of Bitcoin and the associated blockchain, getting into the basics of how it works technically, and looking at the long-term implications. It then branches into blockchains more generally, Ethereum and eventually other cryptocurrencies and crypto networks.

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How to Get Into Cryptocurrency: The Essential Cryptocurrency Resources

1. Why Bitcoin Matters [Article]

By Marc Andreesen

If you’re looking for one resource on how to get started in cryptocurren then Marc Andreesen, the founder of Netscape, gave a high level overview of why Bitcoin matters and why he believes that it is as important a technology as we’ve seen since the Internet and Personal Computing.

“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.”

2. By reading this article, you’re mining bitcoins. [Article]

By Ritchie S. King, Sam Williams, and David Yanofsky

Now that you have a basic understanding of why Bitcoin may be important, this article explains the mining process and network architecture. It also explains some core cryptocurrency concepts like proof of work and hash functions.

“What bitcoin miners actually do could be better described as competitive bookkeeping. Miners build and maintain a gigantic public ledger containing a record of every bitcoin transaction in history.”

3. Fat Protocols [Article]

By Joel Monegro

Fat Protocols is a way of thinking about how investing in cryptocurrency is different from investing in the internet.

Most financial gains from the internet came from the “fat” application layer (Google, Amazon, Facebook) as opposed to the “think” protocol layer (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP).

Cryptocurrency appears to work in the opposite way: a “fat” protocol layer (Bitcoin, Ethereum) is more valuable than a “thin” application layer. There have been many critiques of this approach (including from me) since it came out, but it’s still valuable to understand how the thinking began.

“Here’s one way to think about the differences between the Internet and the Blockchain. The previous generation of shared protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) produced immeasurable amounts of value, but most of it got captured and re-aggregated on top at the applications layer, largely in the form of data (think Google, Facebook and so on).

The Internet stack, in terms of how value is distributed, is composed of “thin” protocols and “fat” applications. As the market developed, we learned that investing in applications produced high returns whereas investing directly in protocol technologies generally produced low returns.

This relationship between protocols and applications is reversed in the blockchain application stack. Value concentrates at the shared protocol layer and only a fraction of that value is distributed along at the applications layer. It’s a stack with “fat” protocols and “thin” applications.”

4. The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency [Podcast]

By Tim Ferriss, Naval Ravikant and Nick Szabo

Note: I did a tweetstorm summary of the podcast here

Nick Szabo is a computer scientist, lawyer, and cryptographer best known for his research in digital contracts and cryptocurrency.

He coined the term “smart contracts” and designed Bit Gold, which is widely seen as the precursor to Bitcoin.

This conversation includes a lot of metaphors and concepts that are helpful for understanding cryptocurrency including social scalability, smart contracts, “Wet” versus “dry” code, and Quantum thought.

“everything we call money is just a bubble that has not yet burst.”

“Increasing the centralization of a system sacrifices security for efficiency. decentralization prioritizes security at cost of efficiency.”

“Think about a dime vending machine as the most basic version of a smart contract:

If Party A deposits $0.25 then return 1 coke; 1 dime; 1 nickel.”

5. The Internet of Money [Book]

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Andreas Antonopoulos is a Bitcoin and cyber security expert. He has been travelling around the world since Bitcoin’s inception explaining the technology and its implications.

The Internet of Money is a “best of” collection from his talks focused on explaining why Bitcoin and cryptocurrency matters. It’s full of useful metaphors for thinking about the underlying technology and its societal implications.

“when I choose an application on the internet to communicate with, I’m also aligning myself with a corresponding community. I don’t use Twitter just because it’s a convenient communication mechanism. I use Twitter because I also agree with many of the concepts and philosophies of the community of other people who choose to use Twitter…

With currency, that choice is a much more powerful political choice. We have entered the realm of meta-politics, of politics by algorithm, of the ability for global communities to form around a common consensus of politics through the choice of currency.”

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6. The Bitcoin Whitepaper [PDF/Article]

By Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown person or persons who designed bitcoin and created its original implementation. He outlined the whole system, now worth over $40 billion, in a nine-page white paper in 2008.

Though it’s definitely techincal, I found that it was very readable once I’d read the above pieces and had a basic understanding of concepts like proof of work and hash functions.

“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.

We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.”

7. Money, Blockchains and Social Scalability [Article]

By Nick Szabo

Note: I also really found Nick’s articles The Dawn of Trustworthy Computing and The History of Money enlightening.

Humans evolved to function in groups of at most 150 people, but technological innovations in the past from money to the internet have extended our ability to co-ordinate with people all over the world.

“Money, Blockchains and Social Scalability” looks at the potential for blockchain technology to extend it yet further and what that might mean for how our world and lives will be organized.

“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…

Without institutional and technological innovations of the past, participation in shared human endeavors would usually be limited to at most about 150 people — the famous “Dunbar number”. In the Internet era, new innovations continue to scale our social capabilities.

In this article I will discuss how blockchains, and in particular public blockchains that implement cryptocurrencies, increase social scalability, even at a dreadful reduction in computational efficiency and scalability.”

8. Ethereum Whitepaper [PDF/Article]

By Vitalik Buterin

Finally, it’s worth taking a deeper dive into the founding document of Ethereum and it’s goal to move beyond cryptocurrency and create a decentralized internet.

Like the Bitcoin Whitepaper, there are technical elements, but I found that having gone through the resources above, I could grasp the big concepts from their original source.

“Ethereum protocol moves far beyond just currency.

Protocols around decentralized file storage, decentralized computation and decentralized prediction markets, among dozens of other such concepts, have the potential to substantially increase the efficiency of the computational industry, and provide a massive boost to other peer-to-peer protocols by adding for the first time an economic layer.”

Since I initially published this article, many other great resources have come out for how to get into cryptocurrency. Here’s a list for further reading:

The Meaning of Decentralization
Vitalik Buterin

AppCoins are SnakeOil and Hyperbitcoinization
The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

A Beginner’s Guide to Institutional Cryptoeconomics
Sinclair Davidson, Primavera De Filippi, and Jason Potts

The Ultimate Bitcoin Argument
Anthony Pompliano

The Bullish Case for Bitcoin
Vijay Boyapati