Library
Reading beyond the courses: topic hubs, story-driven deep dives, the technical deep dives on the roadmap, and crypto’s history as a timeline.
Topics
Broad subject hubs — each one a full reference for a single coin, technology, or market sector. What it is, how it works, the technology behind it, the economics, the philosophy of the people who support it, the history, and the open questions — all in one place.
Coins(2)
Bitcoin
What Bitcoin is, how it works, the technology behind it, the economics and philosophy of the people who support it — a full reference in one place.
~35 min read
Ethereum
What Ethereum is, how it works, the EVM and smart contracts, proof of stake, DeFi, Layer 2s, the DAO hack, and the roadmap — a full reference in one place.
~27 min read
Technology(2)
Blockchain
What a blockchain actually is, how it works, the cryptography and consensus behind it, public vs. private chains, scaling, and where the technology does — and doesn’t — make sense.
~24 min read
Layer 2s & Scaling
Why blockchains can’t just scale on the base layer, the layered model, state channels, optimistic and zk rollups, data availability and blobs, the L2 landscape, and the real tradeoffs of each design.
~19 min read
Sectors(5)
DeFi
What decentralized finance is, the core primitives (DEXes, lending, stablecoins, derivatives), composability, the recurring exploit classes, governance, regulation, and where the risks really are.
~21 min read
NFTs
What non-fungible tokens actually are, how they work, the standards, the 2021 boom, where they have real utility, and where the market is mostly speculation.
~18 min read
ETFs
How crypto ETFs work, the decade-long fight for spot approval, Bitcoin vs. Ethereum ETFs, the staking wrinkle, what the inflows really mean, and the self-custody tension they create.
~17 min read
Altcoins
What an altcoin is, the major categories (L1s, payment coins, privacy coins, meme coins, dead chains), how to evaluate one, and the brutal history of altcoin cycles.
~17 min read
Tokenization & RWA
How off-chain assets — dollars, treasuries, private credit, real estate — get represented as on-chain tokens, the legal wrapper that connects them, the oracle and custody problems, and where the thesis is real versus aspirational.
~26 min read
Coming soon
The rest of the roadmap. Each will get the same treatment as Bitcoin — a full reference in one place.
- Planned
Derivatives & Perpetuals
How crypto futures, options and perpetual swaps work, from funding rates to liquidations, and why leverage magnifies losses.
- Planned
Restaking & Liquid Staking
How liquid staking tokens and restaking reuse staked ETH, and the extra layers of risk each adds.
- Planned
Airdrops & Token Distribution
How projects hand out tokens, from airdrops to vesting and unlock schedules, and how fake airdrops exploit the hype.
- Planned
Account Abstraction
How smart-contract wallets add recovery, spending limits and gas sponsorship, and what ERC-4337 changes.
- Planned
Standards & EIPs
How improvement proposals change Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the token standards (ERC-20, ERC-721 and more) behind what you hold.
- Planned
On-chain Analytics
How to read public blockchain data such as flows, holder concentration and exchange balances, and the limits of what it tells you.
General Deep Dives
Long-form, story-driven explorations of the topics people are curious about — the history, the people, the collapses, and the mechanisms that don’t fit into a single learning module. Pick a rabbit hole.
Looking for the technical side — hashing, signatures, the EVM, rollups? See the Tech Deep Dives.
Stablecoins & Reserves(4)
Tether (USDT): The Stablecoin Everyone Doubts
How the biggest dollar-pegged stablecoin survived opaque reserves, regulatory settlements, and a bank-run stress test — and stayed on top.
~13 min read
Terra/Luna: The $40B Algorithmic Stablecoin Collapse
How a 20% yield, a death-spiral mechanic, and one founder’s confidence vaporised $40 billion in 72 hours.
~13 min read
The Stablecoin Wars: USDC vs USDT vs DAI
Three stablecoins, three completely different engineering and trust models — all pegged to $1. How they compare.
~10 min read
MakerDAO & DAI: The Decentralized Stablecoin Experiment
How a DAO built a dollar-pegged stablecoin out of crypto collateral, survived the 2020 crash, and became DeFi’s reserve asset.
~11 min read
Hacks & Collapses(5)
Mt. Gox: The Original Catastrophe
The exchange that handled 70% of all Bitcoin trade, the 850,000 BTC that vanished, and the decade-long fight to get them back.
~12 min read
FTX: How the "Safe" Exchange Wasn’t
SBF’s rise, the Alameda hole, the Bahamian withdrawal favouritism, and the bankruptcy that shocked even veterans.
~13 min read
The DAO Hack & the Fork That Split Ethereum
A recursive reentrancy bug drained $60M and forced the most contentious decision in Ethereum’s history: undo it or not.
~12 min read
Bridge Hacks: Why Cross-Chain Is the Most-Hacked Category
Bridges have lost over $2.5 billion. Ronin, Wormhole, Nomad — why connecting chains is the hardest security problem in crypto.
~10 min read
DeFi’s Greatest Exploits: Flash Loans, Oracles & Reentrancy
bZx, Cream, Beanstalk, Euler — a tour of the recurring bug classes that have drained billions from decentralized finance.
~9 min read
People & Origins(5)
Satoshi Nakamoto: Who, and Why It Matters
The most-asked question in crypto, treated seriously: the posts, the disappearance, the unmoved coins, and why anonymity is a feature.
~13 min read
Hal Finney: The First Recipient
The cypherpunk who ran Bitcoin on day one, received the first transaction from Satoshi, and kept believing — even after everything.
~12 min read
Vitalik Buterin & the Creation of Ethereum
From a 19-year-old’s whitepaper to the platform that defined programmable blockchains — and the fork that nearly broke it.
~12 min read
The Cypherpunks: 20 Years Before Bitcoin
Tim May, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back — the movement, the mailing list, and the two decades of work that made Bitcoin possible.
~12 min read
Dread Pirate Roberts: Ross Ulbricht & the Silk Road
The idealist who built the first big dark-web market on Bitcoin, the manhunt that caught him, the life sentence — and the presidential pardon. Crypto’s first defining legal and moral reckoning.
~14 min read
Mechanisms & Tech(6)
Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake: The Great Debate
The environmental argument, the “nothing at stake” critique, slashing, and the Merge — one of the largest software migrations ever attempted.
~9 min read
The Block-Size War (2015–2017)
Big Blocks vs. Small Blocks, UASF, the Hong Kong agreement, SegWit, and Bitcoin Cash — the most contentious fight in Bitcoin’s history.
~12 min read
Zero-Knowledge Proofs: From Theory to zk-Rollups
A 1980s academic curiosity became crypto’s hottest scaling and privacy primitive. How zk-SNARKs, zk-STARKs, and rollups actually work.
~8 min read
MEV: Invisible Extraction on Ethereum
Flashbots, sandwich attacks, priority gas auctions — how bots make money off your transaction before it even confirms.
~8 min read
The Lightning Network: Bitcoin’s Bid for Payments
Payment channels, hash-locked HTLCs, routing, and the liquidity problem — how Bitcoin tries to become digital cash, not just gold.
~10 min read
Ethereum’s Roadmap: from the Merge to the Verge
The Surge, the Scourge, the Verge, the Purge, the Splurge — a plain-English tour of where Ethereum is actually going next.
~10 min read
Culture & Markets(5)
NFTs: From CryptoPunks to $69M Beeple
CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks, the 2021 explosion, and where NFTs actually have utility beyond speculation.
~11 min read
The ICO Boom of 2017
How billions were raised on whitepapers, the SEC’s DAO Report, the Howey test, and why most ICO tokens went to zero.
~11 min read
Bitcoin’s Energy Debate: Both Sides Fairly
The actual figures, the Cambridge index, the grid-balancing and methane-capture arguments, and where the narrative shifted.
~8 min read
Crypto & Nation-States: Sanctions, Adoption, Sovereignty
Tornado Cash and OFAC, North Korea’s Lazarus hacks, El Salvador’s Bitcoin adoption, and the CBDC-vs-Bitcoin sovereignty split.
~12 min read
Tornado Cash: Privacy, Sanctions & Code as Speech
A smart contract got sanctioned, its developers went to prison, and a US court ruled immutable code can’t be sanctioned — the strangest crypto case yet.
~10 min read
Money & Macro(2)
What Is Money, and Is Bitcoin It?
The three functions of money, the store-of-value vs. medium-of-exchange tension, and why "digital gold" vs. "digital cash" is unresolved.
~11 min read
1971: The End of Bretton Woods & Why It Matters
The gold-standard exit, the fiat era, the Cantillon effect, and why sound-money arguments recur in crypto culture.
~12 min read
Tech Deep Dives
Technical primers that go under the hood — hashing, signatures, consensus internals, the EVM, rollups, and the mechanisms the general deep dives only hint at. Each one takes a single idea apart down to the math.
Prefer the story-driven reads? See the General Deep Dives.
4 of 49 published — the rest are in progress.
Economic & Game-theoretic(4)
Fee Markets & EIP-1559
How Ethereum swapped a first-price fee auction for a burned base fee and a tip in 2021, what that did to ETH’s supply, and how Bitcoin and blob fees compare.
~14 min read
Slashing & Validator Economics
The specific conditions that cost validators their stake, and the economics of running a node.
~14 min read
Bonded Work & Cryptoeconomic Security
How restaking and shared security let one stake back multiple services — and the risks of correlation.
~14 min read
Token Curves & Bonding Curves
How bonding curves set a token’s price from its supply as it is minted and burned, and how they differ from AMM curves like x·y=k.
~16 min read
Cryptographic Primitives(8)
- Planned
How Hashing Works
What a cryptographic hash is, how SHA-256 digests a block, and why the avalanche effect makes hashes tamper-evident.
- Planned
Nonces & Mining Math
The nonce field, the astronomical odds of finding a valid hash, and why miners iterate quintillions of guesses.
- Planned
Merkle Trees
How hashing transactions into a tree yields a compact root, and how SPV wallets prove inclusion without the full block.
- Planned
Merkle Patricia Tries
Ethereum's state structure — how Merkle tries store accounts, storage, and receipts and enable fast state proofs.
- Planned
Hash Commitments & Preimages
How committing to a hash hides a value until reveal, and where commitments underpin protocols and proofs.
- Planned
Bloom Filters
How light clients probabilistically request relevant transactions without revealing which addresses they own.
- Planned
Key Derivation (BIP32/39/44)
From mnemonic seed to master key to child keys — the HD wallet derivation paths behind every modern wallet.
- Planned
The Quantum Threat
How Shor's and Grover's algorithms threaten ECDSA and hashes, and the post-quantum signature migration ahead.
Signatures & Keys(5)
- Planned
ECDSA vs. Schnorr
The math behind Bitcoin's signatures, why Schnorr is simpler and linear, and what batch verification unlocks.
- Planned
Elliptic Curve Cryptography
secp256k1, point addition and scalar multiplication, and why the discrete log problem secures your keys.
- Planned
Threshold Signatures & MPC
Splitting a key across parties so no single custodian holds the full private key — how MPC custody works.
- Planned
BLS Signatures
Pairing-based signatures that aggregate across thousands of validators, enabling Ethereum's committee efficiency.
- Planned
Signature Aggregation & M-of-N
How multisig, threshold, and aggregate signatures differ, and the trade-offs between them.
Consensus & Block Production(6)
- Planned
Proof of Work Mechanics
Difficulty adjustment, the longest-chain rule, orphaned blocks, and how selfish mining exploits propagation.
- Planned
Proof of Stake & Finality
Slashing, checkpointing, and how Casper FFG + LMD-GHOST give Ethereum economic finality.
- Planned
Verkle Trees
The next-gen state structure whose compact witnesses let stateless clients verify blocks without storing state.
- Planned
Fork Choice Rules
How nodes agree on the chain head across PoW and PoS, and why the rule matters more than the mechanism.
- Planned
Long-Range Attacks & Nothing-at-Stake
The PoS attack vectors that don't exist in PoW, and how weak subjectivity and finality defend against them.
- Planned
MEV & Proposer-Builder Separation
How block construction became a market, and why PBS aims to decentralize the proposer role.
Transactions & Scripting(6)
- Planned
UTXO vs. Account Model
The two accounting paradigms — Bitcoin's parallelizable UTXOs vs. Ethereum's serial accounts — and their trade-offs.
- Planned
Bitcoin Script
The stack-based opcode set, why it's deliberately non-Turing-complete, and what it can and can't express.
- Planned
EVM Internals
Gas, stack, memory, and storage; opcode pricing; and the 26.5k gas floor that shapes every contract.
- Planned
Transaction Lifecycle
From mempool submission to inclusion, fee estimation, and RBF/CPFP replacement strategies.
- Planned
Taproot & Scriptless Scripts
Key-path vs. script-path spends, MAST, and how Schnorr enables smarter spending without revealing logic.
- Planned
Account Abstraction (ERC-4337)
Paymasters, bundlers, and how smart-contract wallets make accounts first-class programmable objects.
Networking & Protocols(5)
- Planned
P2P Gossip Protocols
How blocks and transactions propagate through libp2p/devp2p, and why latency decides who wins block rewards.
- Planned
Ethereum Client/Consensus/Execution Split
The post-Merge architecture — how the execution and consensus clients talk over the Engine API.
- Planned
Light Client Protocols
Sync committees and proof systems that let a phone verify the chain without storing it.
- Planned
Data Availability Sampling (DAS)
How nodes verify block data is available without downloading it all — the foundation of danksharding.
- Planned
P2P DHTs & BitTorrent Origins
The distributed hash table lineage from BitTorrent to modern crypto networking.
Scaling Layers(5)
- Planned
Rollup Mechanics
How optimistic and ZK rollups post state roots to L1, and what execution moves off-chain.
- Planned
Fraud Proofs & Challenge Windows
The 7-day optimistic rollup withdrawal delay, and how fraud proofs keep the sequencer honest.
- Planned
Validity Proofs (SNARKs/STARKs)
Polynomial commitments and the prover/verifier asymmetry that makes ZK rollups trustless.
- Planned
Data Availability Layers
Celestia and EigenDA — what 'availability' means versus storage, and why it's its own problem.
- Planned
State Channels & Payment Channels
How Lightning and Raiden move state off-chain and settle on-chain in a single transaction.
Privacy Mechanisms(5)
- Planned
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
zk-SNARK vs. zk-STARK, trusted setups, and the math of proving without revealing.
- Planned
Ring Signatures & Stealth Addresses
Monero's decoy outputs and one-time addresses, and how they obscure sender and receiver.
- Planned
Federated Chaumian E-Cash
CoinJoin coordination without a trusted party — how Wasabi and Whirlpool mix coins.
- Planned
Homomorphic Encryption
Computing on encrypted data — where it's used in crypto today and where it's still promise.
- Planned
Differential Privacy in Analytics
How chain-analysis firms de-anonymize, and how protocols add noise to resist it.
Low-level Security(5)
- Planned
Reentrancy & Exploit Classes
The bug families — reentrancy, integer overflow, access control — and how each famously went wrong.
- Planned
Formal Verification
Mathematically proving contracts correct, and the tools (K-framework, Coq) that do it.
- Planned
51% Attacks & Reorgs
Deep chain reorganizations, exchange confirmation thresholds, and what a majority hashrate can do.
- Planned
Address Collisions & Vanity Addresses
The birthday-problem math behind vanity prefixes, and why a collision is computationally out of reach.
- Planned
Transaction Malleability
What malleability is, how SegWit fixed it, and the Mt. Gox excuse that wasn’t.