It's ostensibly a BTC podcast, but it's _really_ about much more including second tier networks, altcoin tech, and individual autonomy.

Otherwise, getting involved in the code itself does seem to be the only avenue I've found for real learning.

There's an O'Reilly book that has you build a blockchain from scratch if you're interested.

I'd welcome other suggestions.

Oh, also Tezos has most of Ethereum's features, but is already Proof of Stake.

> Ethereum could be extremely valuable but that its value is currently hurt by the speculation on Ether making transactions far too costly

FYI the price of ETH does not affect the transaction costs. The fee market is independent. There's solutions to this in place and more being worked on though. The 3 biggest contributors will be EIP 1559 which is meant to level out the fees and make them more predictable, L2 rollups which scale through sidechains that have the each of their blocks confirmed on Ethereum's L1 with proofs, and sharding of L1. Ethereum is currently in a growing pains phase as these L2 options gain more traction/adoption, UX for them improves, and all activity migrates there. The end goal is for a majority of interaction to occur on L2 with L1 being used mainly for a settlement layer.

Nowadays I usually go to /r/cryptocurrency/new for the firehose. I do not aim to read everything, just check in and take some notes. What tends to happen on that subreddit is that some really great posts get made but never hit frontpage because they're crowded out by useless memetic content. But you can take individual great posts and turn those into leads by doing some additional legwork. I don't usually talk to those users(I do not want to read comment thread replies and will completely ignore my Reddit inbox, instead I will monitor the thread if it interests me) but I will sometimes browse their post history.