You're taking a year off work to do WHAT?!
My loving wife would also like to learn more about the blockchain
Goals
Become the best in the world at identifying and implementing blockchain opportunities for existing businesses
Gain technical literacy for the world in 2025 & beyond
Learn by teaching; deliver value to readers
Publish 52 blockchain opportunities for an existing companies
Publish 52 tl;dr’s of blockchain whitepapers + industry news
Read 365 crypto whitepapers
Start or meaningfully contribute code to companies/projects advancing the future I want to build
How
After searching for weeks, there isn’t a well-documented path to becoming literate in blockchain technologies. So consider The Blockchain Sabbatical Curriculumᵗᵐ ˡᵒˡ ʲᵏ my attempt to create one. I’ll improve it as I go (please send any recommendations) and detail pros & cons for each resource.
Borrowing inspiration from Scott Young’s MIT Challenge (recreate MIT’s bachelor’s in CS within 12 months via free online courses), I created my first curriculum 6 years ago during my first failed attempt to “get more technical.” Having started Harvard’s CS 50 thrice and MIT 6.001 twice, the first course should be deja vu.
Months 0-3 - Foundations
MIT CS undergrad requirements
Months 4-6 - Literacy
Javascript bootcamp(?)
Ship first on-chain project
Months 7-9 - Application
Needfinding workshops with brands in need of blockchain ideation, experimentation & implementation
Start or contribute to a company/project
Months 10-12 - Expert
Continue needfinding/consulting conversations
Identify the 5-10 year bet and start building
Month 13
Start earning money again
Why Now?
In 2015-2017, most public companies first started mentioning “the Cloud” on their earnings calls. Typically with PR phrases like
“we’re excited about the multitude of opportunities our proprietary data should unlock for us in the cloud” Which usually meant they had no strategy + a maximum 3 employees and a couple vendors exploring it = still years away from harnessing any of the opportunities.
2020 was the first year non-crypto corporations like MicroStrategy & Tesla started to buy Bitcoin for balance sheet reasons, but very few traditional companies are workshopping blockchain applications. No need to fit a square peg in a round blockchain, but my bet is that most companies are taking the wait-and-see approach. Very similar to Cloud adoption.
Fingers-crossed, this hypothesis comes true and many of those executives & shareholders start expensing this newsletter!