Introduction

For many years, I have struggled with the simple question of “What is Blockchain, actually? What is it 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. source

This writing is the outcome of my journey to answer this question without needing to memorize anything. While reading, I ask you 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.

Ground Up

I admired Naval’s idea about how to think clearly, and in this writing, I aspire to establish the same clear thinking mental model for blockchains.

Clear thinker¹” 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.

Organization

To achieve the above, I am using a hybrid writing model in which this is both a book and a wiki. Articles have an order just like book chapters, but they extensively backlink to one another. Moreover, new concepts are always introduced in a specific chapter with the specific context of that chapter in mind. Then, each new concept gets a dedicated page in the Common directory. The dedicated note for this new concept is a more generic definition, and is backlinked in all subsequent references to it.

So, you have two options:

• You can read this as as if it were a physical book from start to finish, without clicking on any of the links, unless if explicitly asked to do so.
• Later on, you can browse this as a wiki, jumping from page to page and get a holistic understanding.

How to Read

• The main content of this book is the order of chapters that are shown in the Homepage.
• Each chapter finishes with links to the previous and next chapter, based on the order in Homepage.
  • Further sub-folders exist, and can be seen in the breadcrumbs and Content page.
• Common is both a glossary, and common definitions that are re-used in different chapters.
  • Each entry in this folder contains a “Introduced In” section, which points out to the first chapter that introduced this concept, followed by a full list and graph of backlinks.
• A file-tree is available, allowing direct navigation to any other part.
• I highly suggest enabling the reading mode (the book icon next to theme switcher) to reduce clutter while reading.

Audience

I hope this work has something to offer for various groups of people, but I cannot ultimately name one group as my target audience. Based on my guesses:

• If you are a programmer, just getting started with blockchains: This book has a lot of foundational knowledge to offer, but won’t teach you any coding
• If you are a totally non-technical blockchain enthusiast/investor: This book can certainly help you understand the underlying premises of blockchains better, but might be slightly too technical at places
• If you are a non-programmer, but have hovered around tech (e.g. project/product managers, aspiring founders or decision makers) and are interested, or actively working on blockchains: I believe this book’s level of detail is perfect for you.
• If you are a seasoned and technical blockchain person: A big part of this book might be a rephrasing of what you already know. I hope though reading this, you can find better mental models and organization for what you already know.

Ultimate Goal

As it stands, blockchain technology is mainly finding product-market fit and adoption in the financial realm. My ultimate goal in writing this is to contribute to a future scenario, in which I can look back at my long career in Web3 and say that this technology improved many things for humans, beyond changing the wheels of our financial system.

To do that, I am inspired by the following:

Four steps of doing great work from Paul Graham: 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.

So, my ultimate goal is to take steps towards the two main steps of this framework:

• learn enough to get to the frontier
• notice gaps, explore promising ones

I hope I can learn the gaps in the blockchain technology and enable its further adoption by writing this, and my readers can do the same.

Accuracy

A small disclaimer that this book is a passion project, and while I have done my best to be unbiased and accurate in it, I cannot deny that most of it has been written in my pastime and based on the knowledge that I have gained throughout the past 7 years in an ongoing manner by skimming twitter and reading blog posts, and not extensive research at the time of writing². For sure, my knowledge on some topics might be partial/incorrect, or my list of examples might not be comprehensive. I appreciate any contribution and corrections from the readers.

Polkadot?

While I spent about 7 years working on Polkadot at the time of writing, I do not intend this writing to be particularly centered around 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 has been a great project for me to learn blockchains from. This is because based on my comparisons to the rest of the ecosystems, Polkadot is an interesting mix of:

• Trying out radically new technical and social experiments
• Most importantly, it remains vigorously “aligned” with the original, Bitcoin and Ethereum style cyberpunk Web3 values.

More specifically, if I were to name the single most important resource that inspired me while writing this, it would be this TED talk from Polkadot founder Gavin Wood.

Publishing and AI

This book is written using Obsidian, and published using Quartz³. I have found immense joy in using these two amazing tools, and I intend to keep writing more content with them.

All of the content here is written directly by me⁴, and no LLMs have been used. I have used LLMs for parts of the Quartz customization.

Contributions

This version of this book is available online, and will always remain free. To contribute, consider:

• Opening pull requests with corrections.
• Tipping via any of my public blockchain addresses here.

Footnotes

1. also see https://blog.kianenigma.com/post/personal/clarity/ ↩

2. most of this has been written in late 2025. ↩

3. Checkout Obsidian Garden Gallery for more amazing websites created using Obsidian. ↩

4. which might explain my grammar and dictation errors as a non-native speaker. ↩