Now, there are tons of resources out there about blockchain by way of whitepapers, blogs, you-tube videos, courses, medium articles, twitter feeds, reddit posts etc. The amount of time and effort put in by each and every contributor to share their knowledge and learning is commendable and I would like to thank each and every of them for their effort and time to educate others of which I am a recipient myself. The amount of knowledge out there is vast and unlimited.
Why am I starting another blog on a topic which everyone is already talking & writing about? The reason is I am on a journey - a journey of learning, exploring and understanding this new paradigm and technology. And I want to share my journey with others. It is said that
One of the best ways to learn a concept really well is to try to explain it to someone else
Also, valuable feedback from others will help to correct my understanding and add more value.
Why blockchain? I see that in trying to understand blockchain, I have to
refresh topics from my learning days as well as
deep dive into many aspects of financial services which I know or may be aware of but do not interact with on a daily basis and
learn entirely new topics.
I found that trying to understand blockchain forced me to read more on
- History & Economics of Money
- How Central Banks manage economies
- Behavioral Economics
- Programming
- Open Source
- Compliance & Governance
- Cryptography, among others
Being in the financial services sector over the last 20 years have given me a perspective where I can see this technology
- Changing the way current processes are done. E.g., payments, financing etc
- Introducing new paradigms - Decentralization, Immutability, Trust-less, zero-knowledge proofs etc (and more!!)
One fascinating aspect is that the technology is still in its infancy (ARPANET stage or early internet days). So the potential of this technology is still a moving target.The pace of change in this space is so rapid. But the underlying concepts remain the same - It is all about money (value), improving efficiency and inclusive development.
Another fascinating aspect is it questions the requirements of various "Institutions" we take for granted today which I will get into later.
My objective is to try to cut out the noise around this paradigm and try to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!!).