Hacker News Reader

Comment by boppo1 | Hacker News Reader

I read the Bitcoin whitepaper+some other technical document (I think) and have a real solid grasp on how that works. Ethereum, although I have used defi/erc20/uniswap/etc, I've got no idea how it works. Validators, shards, miners... is there a single source I can go to to learn it all? I've got a pretty high technical threshold so if it gets mathy I'm not intimidated. I just want to finally know how it works.

View on HN

If you really want to dig in, here are the key papers on the PoS algorithm:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437

https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052

To learn about the sharding plan and various other stuff in the roadmap, this is a great technical overview:

https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-gui...

This is a recent guide that attempts to cover everything in depth: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-gui...

Here's the first paragraph of actual content:

Hopefully you’ve heard by now that Ethereum has pivoted to a rollup-centric roadmap. No more execution shards – Ethereum will instead optimize for data-hungry rollups. This is achieved via data sharding (Ethereum’s plan, kind of) or big blocks (Celestia’s plan).

I've been following crypto for years and could probably explain Bitcoin in a pinch, but I'll cheerfully admit I have no clue what that means.

There are many parts to Ethereum and it’s PoS system so I don’t think you will be able to grasp it all in a short read. This is a good start:

https://eth2.incessant.ink/book/00__introduction/00__forewor...

That scares me. I’d want it to be a system so simple anyone could grasp the fundamentals very quickly. Reason being, it’s so important and complexity breeds oversights and bugs. Security is hard.

Most things in society start out simple and grow more complex as we add more speed, security, applications, and so on. See also: medicine, science, flight, computers, the internet.

Bitcoin is a very simple system and very limited in its capabilities, but as far as modern blockchains go it is like the early room-size computers, Ford Model T, or Wright Flyer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com