I like Hyperledger and Trillian for cryptoless blockchains.
Twitter seems to be where the crowd hangs out, or the entrypoint anyhow. You probably want to find out where the protocol developers hang out (discord / telegram)? They seem to be the most tuned into the tech side.
There are some think tanks, economists, and historians which have a very interesting perspective. In the end it's more a social project than a technological one. I struggle to find anything blockchain can do that we couldn't do prior, other than having a public permissionless ledger from PoW.
It's not clear that public-permissionless will win. I certainly don't want my transactions read by anyone in the world. zk-like algos may help here. I can't see paying per instruction ever being cheaper than just renting hardware. It only seems to make sense in a limited context, finance type things. Outside of finance, I also struggle to see any application which can deliver a more desirable UX.
If you want to understand the technology then learning a little bit about hash function and public/private key cryptography will give you the necessary conceptual prerequisites for making sense of smart contracts. At that point you can start reading about the actual implementation details of various blockchains or look further into distributed consensus mechanisms because blockchains are fundamentally about linearizing concurrent event streams and reaching consensus in distributed systems.
I have compiled some explanation in a presentation at https://www.slideshare.net/yashg1/blockchain-a-solution-for-...