A Founder’s guide to No-Code & AI

Day 1: Learning the basics

Tom Louwagie's photo
Tom Louwagie
·

3 min read

The goal for Day 1 is to understand and be able to explain key concepts like:

  • What is Bitcoin?
  • What is Ethereum?
  • What is Web3?

Let' start!

Before diving into Web3 is it is important to start at the beginning, that means learning about the history of money and the first successful cryptocurrency: Bitcoin

Let's start the journey with a high level overview of what Bitcoin is:

Great, now we have some initial understanding of Bitcoin. Let's discover why it even matters:

Now that we got an introduction to Bitcoin and understand why it is important, it's time to learn how Bitcoin actually works:

It's pretty complex, so don't worry if it doesn't make sense from the first time. Watch the video a couple times and take your time. It probably will still be hard to wrap your head around, that's fine for now, let's proceed and come back to it later.

Bitcoin is only one of many cryptocurrencies, we started with it since it's the oldest and most largest cryptocurrencies. Next up, we will look at Ethereum, a cryptocurrency that radically expands the number of things we can do compared to Bitcoin.

So basically Ethereum is a programmable blockchain, that allows anyone to write smart contracts and decentralized applications.

Now the concept of a "smart contract" is probably still pretty fussy so let's look at it in more detail:

Now let's go back to understanding how Ethereum in more detail and how allows us to create smart contracts. To do this we will read the Ethereum Whitepaper:

Understanding his stuff is important if we are going to build our own smart contracts and decentralized applications, so take your time to read through it a couple of times and really try to understand it. Feel free to browse around if you don't understand some concepts, this is normal.

To solidify our understanding we can also check out these 2 resources:

Finally, we have arrived at "Web3". If you spent any time on Twitter then you probably heard about it before, let's look at what it means and why so many people are talking about it:

We will end our first day with the definition of Web3 by Chris Dixon in his post on Why Web3 Matters:

Web1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network — users and builders.

Web2 (roughly 2005-2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations. Most of the value accrued to a handful of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

We are now at the beginning of the web3 era, which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of web1 with the advanced, modern functionality of web2.

Web3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens.

Congratulations on completing your first day in Web3!

It’s very early still and if you believe that Web3 has the potential to change the world then there is no better time than now to start your Web3 journey.

In the next 29 days we will be learning, building and shipping each day.

Let's go to day 2!

Further reading: