Jack Saba walks through how to start in blockchain: read the Bitcoin white paper and CoinDesk, attend hackathons, learn Solidity if you code. He's launching a 3-day course with Draper Labs and IBM covering Ethereum, Bitcoin, and enterprise solutions. Focus on real problems blockchain solves, like slow money transfers in emerging markets.
Chapters
All right, so we've discussed kind of where the blockchain came from, its history, how it's gonna be implemented, and some of the barriers to adoption currently. But if I'm a young person out there and I wanna get involved in the community and learn about it, how do I get involved?
So I would first start with learning about it and becoming really intellectually curious about it. What's good is that it has only been around since 2008, and where we are now is very much an evolution of where we started, 'cause new concepts were created and they kind of built off each other. So I would go back and try to understand Bitcoin either through the white paper or through blogs that were written about it, and then watch how the principles of it laid out and brought us to where we are. Things are changing so quickly that books aren't necessarily the best way to find the resources for this, because if you spend 2 months outside of this, everything has changed already. New thoughts are introduced, new concepts are introduced, etc. So I would look to Websites such as CoinDesk. I would look to Reddit and their communities where people are really up to date on these things. Blogs and—
Are there any newsletters that you subscribe to?
Blockchain Insights, great newsletter on Facebook as well. Then there's thought leaders like Brock Pierce, and there is a book, Blockchain Revolution, that would be worth checking out. So I think that it needs to become intellectually curious about this, stay on top of it, And try to dive in and ask questions. When people are saying, hey, this is the way something's working, dive into what it is and why it's working, and you'll start to become very informed very quickly. And then once you start doing that, attend hackathons. It's a really great way to talk about people that— talk with people that are knowledgeable about this stuff and to start using it. So if you're not a developer, you can be around it and bring business plans. If you're a developer, it's a really great way to start tinkering with it and seeing its potential and where it's at.
I was actually going to ask that. Since it's inherently a technical thing, does it help to be a developer? Should they also be looking at learning code, or is that not a necessity?
So even coders need to learn how to work with this. For example, Ethereum is one of the platforms that will enable really awesome business plans, really new businesses, and really a lot of value in ways that we've not seen before through smart contracts. So really quickly, smart contracts are a code-based logic where it provides an output based on a given input. So something triggers an input, something happens, it provides a given output. To work with those, you need to learn the language of Solidity. So there are some new languages and skills that you need to learn if you're a technical individual. But if you're coming at this from the business side or the marketing side, it's really just about understanding its potential and the use cases and the industries that it's gonna be applied to.
And is Day One doing any sort of investment or workshop? I know you've done a hackathon in the past. Do you have anything coming up, any resources?
Yeah, so we are gonna be putting on hackathons in the future, and we will be doing a blockchain development course with Draper Labs. Draper University and IBM as well. So we are going to be— it's going to be a 3-day course, hopefully run several times, where people come in and they learn about working with different enterprise solutions. So I— or different solutions. So they'll be working with IBM and Hyperledger, which is an open source project. They'll be working with Ethereum and they'll be working with Bitcoin and the APIs.
To attend that, do you need technical skills?
You should have a technical understanding. You should be somewhat of a developer to have a foundation to learn about what we're working on.
And if they wanted more information about Where do you find this information? We'll edit that in later. And then is there anything else that you feel like we haven't touched on in the course of this conversation about blockchain, Bitcoin, and its potential for emerging markets?
Look at what frustrates you. Find really just why does it take 3 days to move money from my account to your account when we can send an email from here or a tweet? about this conversation and someone in Australia is going to know about it 10 seconds later. We should be able to move money the same way. So, look at problems that are just so obvious and are founded in high friction, high cost, or low levels of trust, and the blockchain, a blockchain, could be a solution. So, really dive in and try to understand what the principles of this technology are, and then look for problems and see where they can be applied.
Awesome. Well, thanks for coming in and talking, Jack.
