Did learning blockchain and web3 feel intimidating to you?

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Stephen Hawking

This post is a confession. I debated whether I should write it or not; because intimidation is widespread when it comes to web3. People I interacted with tend to look down on trying to understand the fundamentals of blockchain as ‘beginner’ level and want to skip to more ‘advanced’ topics, which often spirals into a conversation that I struggle to follow, let alone differentiate whether it’s completely bullsh*t or meaningful.

Coming from a science/engineering background, I am not comfortable jumping to conclusions, let alone being a fanatic, without really internalizing a subject from a critical viewpoint. When I finally determined to learn what blockchain and web3 is, I couldn’t find any resource demystifying it and answering my critical questions (until I started having long conversations with ChatGPT :D ). Don’t get me wrong: Yes, like many Twitter threads and blogs list, there are many resources. But here is what I struggled with. I’m sharing these to tell those who feel intimidated or puzzled that you’re not the problem.

There is a lack of critical approach in many resources. Instead of explaining the technology in an intuitive way and asking questions, most resources tend to do one or another:

• Encouraging you to ‘do’ things like downloading a wallet, joining a DAO, or setting up your identity: These may be useful at some point but they are meaningless for those who genuinely want to understand the technology first and have tons of questions in their mind.
• Starting with terminology and jargon: I tried many things like reading books and documentation, discussions, white papers, and taking online courses. Most of these lost me when they started to define a term without explaining why it exists. I've been in the education sector for a while now, and this is not good pedagogy. We need to first understand why something exists before memorizing terms.
• Being a fanatic on a positive or negative side: It was alienating when a resource claiming to educate me on blockchain started pushing its own point of view. I can make these judgments myself if I could learn.

Most content is developer-focused and highly technical, providing little information for those who want to understand the technology. This is expected as the sector is still at a very early stage and the priority is to onboard developers before anyone else. But even if this is the case, most courses jump into writing code even before explaining why this technology exists or matters. This is also concerning to me in the sense that there are too many grants and investments that pour into developer founders but it’s unrealistic to expect only developers to run a successful startup.

There is not enough handholding on how to navigate the scammy parts of the crypto space. A non-negligible number of people in the cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFT/web3 world are scammy. As Vitalik Buterin himself said in a recent interview: “I personally would not blame anyone for being suspicious of the crypto space, because I think most sane people within the crypto space are themselves — ourselves — suspicious of large parts of the crypto space.”

I feel like this is something that most old timers know about this space. For a new person with genuine curiosity and good intentions, there are not enough guardrails against these parts. Discord servers get flooded with scams. People need some literacy on how to differentiate between all these signals and, in such a field that is still overly-complicated, it is left to beginners to learn these things. The whole experience fills someone with a low dose of anxiety which makes true open-minded learning even harder.

Discussions on real-life applications are shut down with slogans. We clearly need to figure out more potentially-valuable use cases. This requires interdisciplinary, open-minded, and critical discussions. But most of these discussions get overwhelmed with a fanatic belief in “decentralization”.

I am familiar with the web2 world. Tons of questions pop into my mind when someone claims to build a decentralized solution to a problem I am somewhat familiar with. Often, their argument starts and ends with “decentralized is better”. When I tried to understand how it would be better, what I met wasn’t openness but dismissal. It is very hard to bring your own perspectives and life experiences to such conversations. If people can’t connect new concepts to their own experiences, it is much harder to learn complicated topics.

The lack of clarity and understanding makes the space exclusive. There are two reasons for this:

• It’s intimidating to ask questions because people in the space assume you understand fundamentals, although I’ve seen several times that they themselves can’t answer simple ‘basic’ questions. Although the meetups and events are full of friendly people, it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation clear of jargon.
• Although people in web3 claim to like it because of ‘decentralization’, domination and demonization of ‘others’ seems to be a hidden agenda. This ‘cult-like’ approach makes the space exclusive. This tweet from Eda summarizes my feelings:

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Can we change it for the better?

I think like everything else, education in web3 is also at baby steps and will keep improving.

This is an interesting problem to work on.

I want to make it easier to intuitively understand how blockchain and smart contracts and cryptocurrencies and DAOs and NFTs and web3 and everything else works. I want to make it easier for all sorts of people to get involved and equipped to discuss these topics. I want to expand conversations beyond basic aphorisms. I want people to be able to avoid scammy stuff.

Please please let me know if I’m not alone and you’ve experienced similar things, or if I’m missing something and being unfair. I’d love to hear your thoughts and have an unbiased conversation.