Blockchain still has too few newbie-friendly oases
A tweet by software engineer Jeff Scott Ward got me thinking last night:
Coincidentally (or maybe not), there was some big news yesterday at Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges: The San Francisco-based company announced it’s going to start offering users 1.25% interest per year on their deposits of U.S. Dollar Coin — essentially Coinbase’s native stablecoin token. Their team openly spun this as a pro-user step to compete with traditional banking, so that’s all good. If you have a passbook savings account at a traditional bank, this definitely makes parking your dollars in Coinbase a competitive alternative at this point, in a way that any average Joe or Jane should be able to understand.
But Jeff’s broader point about the blockchain industry still stands. In general, this space tends to be very unfriendly to newbies. Most communities, documentation, and new products are definitely geared toward either developers or existing HODLers, not folks who are merely blockchain-curious.
My own humble attempt to remedy this is Web 3.0 for Newbies, a collection of links I curate focusing on blockchain as as a computing platform. To give due credit, the project is loosely modeled after the more general Crypto Canon maintained by investment firm Andreesen Horowitz, which I found invaluable when I was first learning about blockchain.
If there are other resources out there worth mentioning, please let me know either via Twitter or email peter[at]indizr.com. I’m also glad to get suggested adds for “Newbies” via this GitHub issue thread, if you’re active on that platform.
I’m all ears on any possible soutions here, as the “newbie gap” is definitely a pet peeve of mine as well.
Finally, if you’re currently setting up your first crypto trading account, I’ve collected a few affiliate-type links for free stuff that might be of interest here. Most of the offers are via Coinbase, but there’s also a handy link to download the Brave web browser, which includes some cool blockchain-y features that I’ve written about previously.
Good luck!
