Crypto Reading list (Jan 2022)

I gather in this page some of the key readings I believe can be helpful to others.
This structure also helped me navigate in that field. Not every item have links.
Note this is a living document. Yes, this can be messy.

Core Crypto Papers

• Bicoin Whitepaper - October 2008
• Ethereum Whitepaper - 2013

Books about Crypto

These are a few book that read like thrillers and who provide good context on how this was build and the people behind.

• The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo
  A thriller like story of how an army of Crypto-hackers is Building the next Internet with Ethereum

• The Blocksize War by Jonathan Bier
  The fight inside the Bitcoin dev community to scale Bitcoin to make it a payment network, vs the more conservative vision as a store a value

• Kings of Crypto by Jeff John Roberts
  The story of how Coinbase was created and how it became the biggest Crypto Exchange in the US

Critical thinking articles

• Proof-of-Stake and Stablecoins: A Blockchain Centralization Dilemma by Lyn Alden
• An Economic Analysis of Ethereum by Lyn Alden

Crypto Domain Breakdown

I am trying here to break down some of the key aspects of Crypto

• Blockchain Tech and underlying principles
  The key here is to understand the concepts behind : a distributed, permissionless, and cryptographicaly secure database. (TODO Blog post)
• Blockchain instances
  • L1 Core Chains : BTC, ETH
  • L1 Gen2 Chains : Solana, Ada, Algorand, Polkadot, Avalanche
• L2 Scaling - Get more throughput, low latency at low cost, while still preserving security
  • Ethereum L2 Scaling solutions
  • State Channels
  • Plasma
  • Rollups
    • Optimistic Rollup - “fraud proofs” (Arbitrum, Optimism)
    • ZK Rollups - “validity proofs”: Zksync (Matterlabs), Starkware
      On Zero Knowledge Proofs, here is a great reading list maintained by Matterlabs
• ERC20 Token
• NFTs : ERC721 and ERC1155

Hands on Learning resources

This is based on hands on lab I have made and documented with samples here

• Austin Griffith Eth.Build To understand the basics on how a Blockchain works and the cryptographic concept behind
• Patrick Alpha Youtube Video - Excellent 14 hours video to become a Solidity (aka: Smart contract programming language) developer

TODO Below

Wallets

TODO

StableCoins

• Centralized StableCoins peed by Fiat : USDT (Tether), USDC (Circle/Coinbase), BUSD
• Decentralized Stablecoins NOT pegged by Fiat : DAI, UST (Terra) which has some fundamental flaws IMOs

DeFi

• Dex
• Liquidity mining
• Lending
• Borrowing

Web3.js API Namespace

https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/v1.5.2/