Sorry for going off-topic, but is there any good community I can join if I am interested only in understanding the technical side of blokchain and blockchain development, its potential use cases and pitfalls.
https://bitcointalk.org/ is also a foundational forum
Bitcoin resources: https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html
Ethereum resources: http://www.ethdocs.org/en/latest/ https://raiden.network/ https://www.plasma.io/ Vitalik’s recent scalability blog post with many links to further reading: https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-re...
All of the legitimate projects have a decent technical community, and many maintain good docs and/or blogs. Personally I find Tendermint and Cosmos very interesting, and I gained a better grasp of proof-of-stake by reading their articles.
Run your own nodes and interact with them from your favorite programming language.
After you have a grasp of the existing technologies used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, I recommend learning about the issues both are trying to tackle going forward (second layer channels, proof-of-stake, sharding). Then you’ll be in a good place to understand the alternatives proposed by newer projects, like using a DAG instead of a blockchain.
The forum is located here: https://ethresear.ch/
They use gitter instead of slack, I think I misremembered.
Onboarding packets for potential collaborators:
http://notes.eth.sg/s/rkxpeG0ff (Hello potential research collaborator! )
http://notes.eth.sg/s/rksCgM0Mz (Hello potential PLT-research collaborator!)