So, I am adjusting my attitude to live with cryptocurrency stuff because I think it is not going anywhere and could still exist for my lifespan. Cryptocurrency/blockchain knowledge like religions, there are good concept applicable and useful in life, there are also tons of bullshit, scam, even violence. I would like to collect sources of knowledge that is not related to any cult non-sense.
Knowledge in crypto/blockchain stuff I would like to know, for example, what's top 5 coins, overall promising regarding transaction rate, fee, market cap, suitable for application (e.g. dapp), technical and philosophical limitation. I have pretty good exploring skills, read a lot of data, but when it comes to knowledge around cult, it takes a lot of energy to filter out greed based statement.
Where are secular sources of crypto space knowledge?
Thanks.
Best place would be to look at what top uni research labs are publishing. Usually when academics get curious about something they start labs dedicated to in depth study. Eg: https://dci.mit.edu/
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/research/publications/Pages/defa...
Look outside the US too.
Its to early to find good sources though imho, given the ever dangling financial incentives.
And as you rightly point out, there is a mindless buffoon class who have discovered showing raging growth (by handing out free stuff to unsophistacted people) will get you more funding (to buy more growth, to get more funding...). This cycle is happening at high speed these days which makes fixing issues that require time extremely hard. Thats a big weakness of anything receiving hype these days.
Bitcoin might have some resemblance and overlap with emergence of religion but it doesnt really satisfy the Needs that religion does. As in there are Needs and Issues people have that finance wont solve. For example, go to a Cancer Hospital anywhere in the world and watch a doc tell parents their kid is not going to survive another month. There are so many similar situations people get thrown into. Many of whom have no great education or access to mental health care. Therefore Religion has survived inspite of all the cults, superstition, wars and death it has produced.
After you are comfortable with these 3, you are golden. Along the way you will also learn to differentiate between scam products and what could be promising
Top 5 coins is easy. You can look at market cap or my list here. bitcoin ethereum monero .........
Look into ENS, IPFS, 'layer 2' chains, bip32, etc.
The core thing to keep in mind when thinking about cryptocurrency is that it is software. 2010 bitcoin is very different from 2021 bitcoin. There is a shitload of funding in the space and a lot of progress is being made. Just because 'bitcoin is slow' or 'bitcoin uses all the energy' today does not mean it will in 5 years.
fwiw: https://github.com/DOACC documented at https://doacc.github.io/
An historical snapshot (in RDF) of the metadata of ~3500 altcoins from mid-2014 to early 2017 when the recording effort was abandoned.
There are a lot of funds flowing through these systems that would otherwise go through other channels. This just happens to be a good way to route around limits on the movement of capital at the moment.
Cryptocurrency is not money, nor is it an investment. It's a bet that the status quo will be maintained long enough for you to withdraw your funds later at a smaller loss than inflation, and a possible speculative gain.
There are a lot of people who mined a few bitcoin back in the day, and lucked out on the speculation, so they all have positive stories to tell, and cautionary tales of selling too soon, not being careful enough, etc.
Consider cryptocurrency to be the newest version of Beanie Babies, and act accordingly.
Source: have PhD in CS in wide-area distributed computing
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You should check it as it is what you are looking for in the long term
tl;dr it’s a cult based on fantasy and misconceptions and greed, rather than a cult based on superstition and power.