Over the past few weeks, we have been reading and watching a lot of material about the blockchain and some of its variants (including the Bitcoin blockchain of course). The goal is not only to understand how it works technically, which will be necessary in order to understand how we can use it, but also to understand where it comes from, how it was created.

And we wanted to share with you some of the best resources we have found so far.

First things first. What are Bitcoin and the blockchain?  The first presentation is a great introduction that illustrates how Bitcoin and the blockchain are changing the rules of our world.

The second one is a presentation from Vinay Gupta, explaining in very clear terms how the blockchain came to be, from an historical standpoint, and how it fits in the timeline of data storage mechanisms. We love this talk because it doesn’t focus too much on the economic side of things but it sees the blockchain as a software paradigm, and a development platform, and that’s what we are really interested in as well, even though the currency part of it cannot be separated.

Vinay Gupta at Michel Bauwens & the Promise of the Blockchain from FIBER on Vimeo.

The third resource is also a video, a presentation by Andreas Antonopoulos, the author of Mastering Bitcoin, one of the THE reference books on how to develop on top of the Bitcoin blockchain apparently (we bought the book, didn’t read it yet). What we really love about this guy is that he is deeply invested in the Bitcoin blockchain, and yet he remains very curious and open-minded about all the evolutions of the blockchain technology. And as we are progressing in that space, we can see that a lot of people who have invested (or speculated) a lot on Bitcoin don’t really like the idea of being challenged by new tools and techniques about their core beliefs and assumptions. In that context, this talk and all of Andreas’ contributions are quite refreshing.

The last resource we wanted to mention in this blog post is a MOOC that I (Sebastien) have started following. It’s not free, it costs 830£ (by the way, given recent events, if you pay in euros or dollars, 830£ will be cheaper than usual), but so far, 2 weeks in, I must say that I’m pretty happy with the quality of the content.

I was kind of frustrated by the Ethereum tutorial, which seems pretty outdated and lacks a lot of details to get going. But the b9lab academy content is very practical and gives plenty of pointers to learn more around the main content. So far, it’s exactly what I was looking for. And one cool thing about this MOOC is that it will end with a certification that will be written to the Ethereum blockchain so that attendees can prove they followed through this course.

We will keep sharing some of the most interesting resources we find, both in English and French, about those topics, so if you have some resources to recommend yourself, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

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Sébastien Arbogast
Développeur passionné et indépendant, entrepreneur dans l’âme et apprenti visionnaire, je suis toujours à l’affût de ces technologies qui vont bouleverser le monde et nos sociétés. Consultant depuis plus de 12 ans, je me suis récemment lancé à la conquête de la blockchain, je donne des conférences et des formations sur le sujet (notamment en ligne sur Udemy). A côté de ça je suis curieux de plein de choses: la conquête spatiale, la moto, la musique électronique, les hippocampes albinos ambidextres… plein de choses.