Where should one go to learn how all of these systems work? I've been trying to make an honest effort to understand how smart contracts, protocols, decentralized exchanges, etc. work, but after reading about the absolute basics quickly get bogged down in a sea of acronyms and jargon that seemingly lacks any clear explanation. This doesn't even include all of the shills, scams, etc.
> Where should one go to learn how all of these systems work?
Here's the path I'd suggest:
1) If you have no basic understanding of blockchains, read Satoshi's Bitcoin original paper, and Ethereum's Yellow paper.
2) Read about ERC-20 [1][2], to understand what "tokens" really are (TLDR: basically a hashtable stored in the ethereum blockchain, containing a mapping of balances to addresses, and the expectation that you must implement a standard API to be considered an ERC-20 token)
3) Learn about Solidity. The language is dead simple if you have any programming background (preferable C, but not too different than Rust/Python/Go), although it takes some time to wrap your head around the idea that the state is stored permanently in the blockchain. There's plenty of tutorials, but I found Ivan on Tech [3] to be excellent, and Moralis Academy [4] if you want something more structured (plus they offer many other courses in this area).
Solidity documentation [5] is also excellent. And Remix IDE [6] makes it really easy to experiment and run your "hello world" solidity programs in a simulated environment, without worrying about deploying to testnet, faucets, etc.
