Money, Blockhain and Bitcoin

At my previous company Twospoon, we held weekly Monday talks where colleagues took turns and presented on topics of interest.

When I got to know when my turn came, I immediately knew I wanted to talk about blockchain, which is something I had no prior knowledge of, and wanted to learn for a long time. I'm not a CS grad like my teammates, so I wanted to present something technical that would challenge me to learn deeply.

As I started my research, I realized that understanding blockchain required understanding what money is and how it evolved over the years. I went through the MIT OpenCourseWare's "Blockchain and Money" course, which provided a comprehensive overview of the history of money and financial systems.

Then I moved on to learn about Bitcoin, reading and understanding the Bitcoin whitepaper and other supporting technical blogs. I also referred to a lot of videos throughout the process for visual understanding, like 3Blue1Browns's "But how does bitcoin actually work?".

In total, I spent nearly a month in this research and loved every bit of the learning process. While a few concepts were easy to grasp, understanding the technical implementation from first principles, like cryptography, was new and difficult. I took notes throughout and created my own diagrams for concepts where I felt existing explanations could be clearer.

On the day of the presentation, I was excited to put forward all my hardwork and research in front of my colleagues. I went through the slides, telling it like a story.

I started with the history and evolution of money first, how early ledgers and currencies worked, their flaws and how each new form solved previous limitations. Then I explained what led to the need for a decentralized system, the early versions of digital money and their issues, and finally went in deep on how Bitcoin solved those problems with its unique technical implementation.

My colleagues appreciated the deep understanding I demonstrated and the way complex systems were explained with logical flow and diagrams. They said it gave them a new perspective on money and the financial system that we all are involved in everyday.

Post the presentation and for all the research I had done, I wanted to expand the content into a long-form article, so that it would serve as a single resource to learn about Bitcoin deeply and that it can be shared to those who are interested in this topic.

I structured the article the same way as the presentation, starting with the history of money, explaining the need for a decentralized system, and then diving into Bitcoin's technical implementation.

I used the images from the presentation and expanded on each individual concept, so that the article provides a comprehensive overview of all the topics. I also added more details and explanations that I had to skip during the presentation due to time constraints.

Link to the article: neerrrajj.substack.com/p/money-blockchain-and-bitcoin

My general opinion about blockchain and Bitcoin had not been very positive based on what I had heard, but learning the technology and history behind it gave me a fresh perspective on the financial system we use everyday.

I realized that modern money is itself a very recent invention, so we cannot know what the currency of future transactions might be. The research made me believe more in the blockchain technology and how significant of a shift it is, in how we think about money and trust.

This also showed me that with enough curiosity and persistence, no thing is hard to understand and that I can learn, as well as teach technical concepts from scratch.