Busy week at the Dojo! Keeping up with the articles, reading the Crypto Canon, and the Chainlink Spring Hackathon started! Not to mention how much technical stuff I kept up with (my course, projects, and more)
If the technical stuff is more your thing, you can find that here.
By the way, I passed the Python Stack Exam! This was the penultimate step in my bootcamp journey, now I just have to build a couple of projects to graduate from the Coding Dojo.
<usual_enterance> If you're new here I'm creating this blog series as I go from coding newbie to working in web3. I'm creating this to reflect on the technical and non-technical growth and to leave it behind for others who might be interested in how they can follow a similar path. </usual_enterance>\
In this week's non-technical recap:
- Daily Articles, focused on NFTs
- a16z Crypto Canon readings
- Chainlink Spring Hackathon status
- What's Next?
Articles
I tweet every day about at least one web3 article, here are the biggest takeaways from those articles this week:
- dNFTs retain unique identifiers while allowing metadata to be updated via a smart contract that details when and how
- No guarantee to avoid rug pulls, have to research team, community, and roadmap; mint on official sites, look for red flags, and don't give personal details
- NFT and Crypto-enabled economies can increasingly be relied on to support a creator economy. These remove rent-seeking intermediaries, enable granular price tiering, customer acquisition costs are near 0
- Stories and scarcity are driving more people to NFTs than crypto
- Ownership endows power, and NFTs allow for ownership that is better for every stakeholder
- NFT subculture may follow a path similar to photography and streetwear where controversy and rejection from the mainstream are normal before the establishment's initially adoption
- Community ownership incentivizes participation, improvement, and value development
And you can find my sources here:
- What Is a Dynamic NFT?
- NFT Rug Pulls — Be Aware of the Signs!
- NFTs and a Thousand True Fans
- Stories, Scarcity and Mimetic Desire
- NFTs make the internet ownable
- NFT Subculture
- Creators, Communities, and the Gray Space in the Middle
a16z Crypto Canon
This week's crash courses from the Crypto Canon were in governance, privacy, security, scaling, and consensus. Reading through this list feels like college all over again...
Governance
Governance options for blockchain are varied and on/off-chain options exist. The best options are very much up for debate.
- An overview of governance in blockchains
- Governance deep dive
- The myth of the irrational token holder
- Blockchain governance/ governance 101
- Blockchain governance
- Against on-chain governance
- On-chain vote buying and the rise of dark DAOs
- Thoughts on governance and network effects
- Notes on blockchain governance
Privacy and Security
Privacy is colloquially misused in blockchain, we actually have pseudonymity but solutions like Zk-SNARKS/SNARKS are a possible solution for changing this.
- Privacy on the blockchain
- Securing smart contracts (series)
- Ethereum smart contract best practices
- Town Crier: an authenticated data feed for smart contracts
- Devcon3 panel on formal verification
- What are zk-SNARKs?
- Introduction to zero-knowledge proofs
- Understanding zero-knowledge proofs
- Zk-SNARKs: under the hood (series)
- STARKs, part I: proofs with polynomials
Scaling
To sum it up; scaling is usually what's sacrificed in building public blockchains and solutions for the trilemma can be found in various layer 1 and 2 solutions.
- Blockchains don’t scale
- The decentralized-consistent-scale (DCS) triangle
- Models for scaling trustless computation
- What are zk-SNARKs and why do they matter? (a fable)
- Platform currencies may soon be obsolete
- The importance of layer two
- What is the Lightning Network and how can it help bitcoin scale?
- Making sense of Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling solutions: state channels, Plasma, and Truebit
- On managing tradeoffs between Layer 1 and Layer 2 innovations
- Scaling Tezos
- Ethereum scalability research and development subsidy programs
- A beginner’s guide to Ethermint
- Construction of a plasma chain 0x1
- Accounts, transactions, gas, and block gas limits in Ethereum
- Interplanetary linked computing: separating Merkle Computing from blockchain computational courts
- Ethereum sharding: overview and finality
Consensus
Consensus involves a lot of high-level computer programming theoretics and applications that are difficult to understand for someone with a philosophy & political science bachelor's (which admittedly, did help with the game theory components).
- What it means to have consensus in a distributed system
- Decentralization in bitcoin and ethereum
- A proof of stake design philosophy
- Delegrated proof of stake: Features and tradeoffs
- Seeking consensus on consensus
- Consensus Comaparisons
- Ethereum Casper 101
- The history of Casper (series)
- Inflation and participation in stake-based token protocols
Chainlink Spring Hackathon
The hackathon started this week and I was able to attend every event thus far from the Opening Ceremony to their introductions to various technologies like Smart Contracts, Hardhat/Browning, Truffle, etc (see the full list of events here). Aside from the smart contract intro video, all of this was new for me. As a reminder, all of my technical growth if you've been reading those blogs has been focused on the basics as I have been building these before jumping into web3.
The non-technical webinars for the hackathon included an intro to smart contracts and Chainlink. What I learned wasn't too much considering how much I have been researching all of the basic components for the last year and how closely I try to follow Chainlink already. Regardless, repetition builds confidence and it is always worthwhile to hear information from a different speaker and so I found it helpful.
The team was able to decide what we're going to be building but we've decided to keep it under wraps until the initial production is complete. Follow the technical recaps if you want to see the technical side of what I'm learning in this hackathon.
What's Next?
Looking ahead to next week, I've got the daily articles (this is week 2 of NFTs), the Crypto Canon (at least the "Cryptoeconomics, Cryptoassets, and Investing" and "Fundraising and Token Distribution" sections), plenty of webinars for the hackathon, projects to work on, and class (and not to mention a list of other things that normally happen in my life). Somehow, I'll fit all of that in.
If you'd like to join the learning community I'm building on Discord for web3, you can find the link for that here. It's a space that I am trying to build for myself and others to share their growing knowledge of all things web3.
You can also find me here:
LinkedIn | GitHub | Twitter | My Website
