Have you bothered to read the Ethereum white paper yet?

This September marks my 4th year being involved in crypto. I don’t consider myself to know what I am really doing beyond simply buying, selling and a bit of staking. I am not an expert, analyst, or trading savant. I am a novice at best with a keen interest for try new things and learning by trial and error. I have made mistakes, lost coins through transactions, been rugged with NFTs and Defi projects, spent too much fiat, and made a friend or two across various crypto communities. I am sitting here looking back on my time so far in crypto and wondering how I have even made it this far. Myself and probably many of you alike, haven’t really began to even scratch the surface of what crypto is and where it came from. Most of just know it can make us money and that’s enough.

This isn’t an historical post about ETH from it’s infancy to what it is today, no. I am far too much of a lay-person to speak about such a topic with any sort of authority or genuine intellect. I know a bit, but not enough to go on at length or make the inferences needed to understand larger contexts unbeknownst to me.

The reason I wanted to make this post was to pay some sort of homage to the first crypto I bought; Ethereum. Now, 4 years ago I didn’t even know what DYOR meant, let alone what ETH even was or could do. I didn’t know what a L1 or L2 was or how something like Ethereum even worked to create value, store information, or anything to do with blockchain. All I knew was that someone I knew told me about it and how awesome it was. “Awesome for what?” I asked. “Read the whitepaper” was the response I received.

Whitepaper - What the heck is that?

It makes a whole lot of logical sense to actually read about the thing I am about to excitedly invest into, right? Sounds pretty responsible and what anyone else would do, right? Wrong. Once I figured out how to sign up for Coinbase, I bought that ETH as fast as I could.

I bought my first Eth without knowing what it was or what I was supposed to do with it. I didn’t bother to read the Whitepaper or even learn what I was getting into.

Looking back now, I see how novel the experience of buying crypto is, and that first transaction was an historic moment for me; just as it was for you. It was a bit of a leap of faith into the literal unknown and a risky move to say the least. Being now a seasoned novice, I took it upon myself to actually try to read the Eth whitepaper. Maybe I’d be better off for it and learn a bit more.

Yes, I saw the BTC whitepaper post earlier and thought, hey, why haven’t I been more intentional in trying to know more about something that I spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing over? I also thought that maybe others would resonate with my experience and share their experiences too. This post is not in response to that one, but more for me to get out my experience. (Posting is admittedly sort of therapeutic for me).

Enough of my rambling on though. ETH white paper. To start - compared to the BTC whitepaper, the ETH one is a lot more dense and complicated to understand. I even think that people who read it in 2013 were left scratching their heads over it. As I mentioned, I am not going to try and explain the ETH whitepaper or summarize it but I want to share a document that helped me to better understand what I was supposed to be getting from the ETH white paper. I need that simple explanation and common language to make it make sense in my mind. So for anyone interested – ETH white paperand the simplified version.

If you’ve read this far, I can only say thank you and good luck on your crypto journey. I hope you find some new information for yourself here. See you on the daily!

Edit. Ps. Yes I also own bitcoin too. I’m not dumb.