1/ I spent most of the afternoon reading on Github, and for whatever reason was reminded of the many hours I spent digging through developer docs in 2013 when I first went down the bitcoin rabbit hole (and there was barely anything to read but the developer docs)
2/ I have often been asked how I went about learning about it, as the mechanics of it are pretty complex, esp for someone without a background in CS or cryptography. So in case it's useful for anyone out there, here's what my process for learning about most things looks like:
3/ At the beginning, look for basic articles –– Wikipedia or high-level press. You want to create a very rough sketch in your mind about the topic at hand. There will be lots of holes and fuzzy areas, but you can fill those in later.
4/ Look for articles of increasing complexity. If you need to understand a different concept to move fwd (i.e. need to learn what a Pedersen Commitment is in order to grasp the mechanics of a protocol) open a new tab and do a bit of reading, but don't get stuck.
5/ Important: don't worry that you don't understand everything. Just keep reading. Brains are magical in that they will later fish out information that you didn't even know you had archived, and all of a sudden the full picture starts to form.
6/ I find that concentrated reading about one topic is way more effective for deep understanding and long-term memory gelling than flitting between topics (even if total amount of time is equal in both cases) .
7/ Spend a couple of days or weeks really going into something and you will both understand and retain it 10x better. This moves it from something that you "learned" (and could forget) to something that you "know" –– in the same way you know your childhood memories (permanent).
8/ Reading about the same thing from different sources is great, & should not be viewed as a waste of time. The style / explanation mode of some writers will naturally suit you better,so the same idea which seemed incomprehensible from one source will suddenly click from another.
9/ Take notes, by hand. I almost never review them but the simple act of writing them forces me to summarize and internalize the concepts.
10/ Also worth noting that this process works for me because I learn best by reading, & only like learning from others once I have a baseline understanding of the topic. In college, lectures were basically useless for me unless I had read ahead of time. People vary in this regard
11/ Most importantly, have fun and just keep going. Genuine interest in a topic is the best driver!
