I have spent the last 4 years immersed, at times drowning, in the cryptocurrency and Web3 space. A deeply rooted desire for “success” drove me from one milestone to the next. But as I finished my first cycle and entered my second, I must confess that I know incredibly little about the blue ocean I spend most of my waking hours living in.

I do understand, at least at a high level, blockchain fundamentals (e.g. terminologies, infrastructure, asset types), metas/sectors (e.g. DeFi, NFTs, SocialFi), community (e.g. Twitter, Discord, Telegram), basic tooling (e.g. etherscan/block explorers, trading platforms, TG bots), and culture (e.g. memes, CT-native references). Despite this, looking back, I have learned relatively little beyond what I have passively absorbed. I know more than I think, but I have recently committed myself to a much more conscious effort at understanding the details of the space I show up to everyday.

As part of these reflections, I began asking: “What percentage of CT knows more than the fundamentals, if that?”. As I see people aping into one new infra layer after another, I can’t help but wonder how many “investors” today can explain the makeup of those chains, the concept of blockchain modularity, the differences between Cosmos, Celestia, and Initia, etc.

I’m not asking for the purpose of questioning what CT should or shouldn’t know. I’m primarily interested in understanding what they do know for my own context. Where does my knowledge stand, what exactly is my edge, and what should I double-down on? I believe I’ve been deep in Dunning-Kruger’s valley of despair, and deciding what to do next has been a painfully slow process of introspection.

Maybe most of CT doesn’t actually care about why or how MegaETH is approaching the idea of a real-time blockchain, including the tradeoffs that would make that possible. But knowing whether they care or what they understand has been a big missing piece in my perspective of the market and space. And from what I’ve gathered so far, perhaps very unsurprisingly, incredibly few understand crypto and Web3 even at the technical baseline I touched on above.

This doesn’t mean you need to understand everything (e.g. the formulas, equations, and proofs that allow all of this to happen). But, similar to the asymmetric upside of learning coding/AI today, there is a significant opportunity today of carving out time to learn just enough.

Especially with the continued growth of AI, learning new spaces (or old) has never been more accessible. In my first two days of starting from zero, I learned (well enough to explain) blockchain structure (how they are visually and functionally represented), monolithic vs. modular structures, PoS vs. PoW (including Ethereum’s transition to modularity), methods of modularizing (e.g. validium, optimium), data availability, and more.

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