For many years, I have struggled with the simple question of “what is Blockchain useful for?“. I had some “memorized” answers, but I can confess that I never set aside the time to deeply understand it.
If you understand it, you don’t need to memorize it. If you don’t understand it, you don’t want to memorize it. - Naval
This writing is the outcome of my journey to answer this question without needing to memorize anything. Promise me to forget everything you know about blockchains alongside me, and follow me step by step. I promise it will make sense at the end, and you will finish with a brand-new understanding of this technology.
Writing Style
I enjoy writing in a structured manner that resembles academic writing. This is not meant to intimidating, but rather help my readers understand the topic from the foundations. It requires more patience, but I have come to realize that despite the shortening attention spans, it is still the only good way to learn something.
I admired Naval Ravikant’s idea about how to think clearly, and in this writing, I aspire to establish the same clear thinking mental model for blockchains.
Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”
Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up. To use a math example, you can’t understand trigonometry without understanding arithmetic and geometry.
Richard Feynman very famously does this in “Six Easy Pieces,” one of his early physics lectures. He basically explains mathematics in three pages. He starts from the number line— counting—and then he goes all the way up to precalculus. He just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic. He doesn’t rely on any definitions.
Throughout this work, I try to establish a shared vocabulary, always backlink to it, and adhere to an unbroken chain of logic methodology.
TODO: word on conciseness, and my goal for this to be as short as possible.
Audience
My main audience for this work are programmers and practitioners who already understand software engineering and digital systems and want to expand their understanding into Blockchains. Foremost, the best reader of this work is someone who has just started their career in Blockchain. Secondly, this work aims to be useful for decision makers who have had a glimpse at the potential of blockchains, and want to invent and innovate in this space, yet lack the deep understanding to see the gaps.
Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physicists. Paul Graham, How to do great work
In some sense, I am creating the book that I wish I had access to at the year 2018, when I was finishing my Computer Science Msc. degree, and exploring a career in a blockchain company.
Goal
Likely not up to date with all the latest tech trends out there, I admit. My hope is not to teach you all the lest in the micro level so you can invent “how to make an Rollup that does the exact same thing 3% faster”, but to discover what the next (or perhaps the second best, after DeFi) proper use-case for this technology stack that we call crypto and blockchain is.
Polkadot?
While I spent about 6 years working on Polkadot at the time of writing, I do not intend this writing to be particularly centered around Polkadot. This is not a sale’s pitch of Polkadot. The early chapters will purely be about general blockchains, and later chapters about scaling will cover Polkadot as one of the approaches.
Yet, I cannot deny that my understanding of blockchains has a Polkadot-oriented Bias: I learned all of this through the lens of Polkadot, so some degree of bias is unavoidable.
That being said, I believe that Polkadot is indeed a good blockchain to let influence our biases to a small degree as it is founded by one of main architects of the blockchain space, the person who coined many of the principles I use in this book such as Web3 and Resilience, the Ethereum cofounder and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood. This gives me confident that such biases will all be towards keeping the blockchain space centered around its main value offering, creating Resilience systems and replacing elements of Human-based Trust with Science-based Trust.