No matter what brings you into the blockchain world, pure curiosity, desire to make money by investing in crypto or passion for participating in the emerging industry, you will face many challenges ending up very confuse. You will have questions about where to start, difficulty of digesting knowledge and user-unfriendliness.

We are writing this article to introduce you several useful resources that may be really helpful for beginners to move up the level of understanding. These tools, including beginner guides, news sites, blogs, digital wallets and information sites, can save your time and lead you straight to the point.

Get your theory right

Understanding the knowledge of blockchain is not easy as there are too much information to grasp aside from the confusing terminologies developing every day. When you try to search something on the internet, similar good references are usually distributed in different sites, so we picked out several quality resources to provide you a headstart.

We categorized the information sources into 3 types: Basics, News and Blogs. You will be able to gain fundamental knowledge to deep insights, at the end of this read, you will have a comprehensive view of the blockchain world.

Basics

What is blockchain? What is smart contract? These knowledge bases explained many common terms and concepts to beginners. You can start with some phrases you know of but do not understand thoroughly or make this a reference where you can check it out new terms you pick up along the way in these basic guides.

• CoinDesk Beginner’s Guide
• Cointelegraph Cryptopedia
• Blockgeeks Guide

News

After knowing the basics, you have to keep up with the fast evolving blockchain industry (warning: it is faster than Ferrari). News sites will provide the latest updates which enable you to catch up with the recent important developments (but beware of fake information).

• CoinDesk
• CoinTelegraph
• CCN
• NewsBTC
• Bitcoinist

Blog

You are able to dig up many valuable insights on blogs and Medium, because there are many influencers sharing their perspectives on certain topics. If you want to have a deeper understanding, blogs and Medium are the places you should go.

• Hackernoon
• Futuresin
• CryptoOracle
• ConsenSys

Start on your practical lessons

After having the fundamental knowledge of blockchain, you should venture a step further from reading by getting into the action of it all.

Wallet

Creating a digital wallet and storing the assets on blockchain is easy, with a digital wallet, you can transfer funds to your friends, invest in ICOs and use DApps on a blockchain.

• MyEtherWallet: After accessing the website, you only need to set an user password and press the confirm button, and taddaa… your wallet is created. This is probably the simplest way to create a wallet. You can imagine your wallet as your account in the blockchain world which can be used to store, send and receive the assets issued on the blockchain.
  MyEtherWallet has the basic function of transferring ETH and tokens, so you can use it to buy ICO tokens (a process of sending funds to ICO issuers and they will return tokens back). However, MyEtherWallet is not capable of connecting to DApps, such as CryptoKitties and decentralized exchanges. The solution is to export your private key, then import it to other digital wallets, just like using your debit card and password to access your account on different ATMs.

Besides, MyEtherWallet’s knowledge base is a treasure trove worth your reading time where it illustrates many important concepts regarding wallet and assets transfer.

• MetaMask: This is currently the most popular digital wallet which is a browser extension (Google Chrome). The most beneficial feature to users is that it can directly connect to any DApp. But its limitation is that it can not transfer tokens unlike MyEtherWallet.

There are many more digital wallets out there. If you are interested in different kinds of digital wallets, like mobile wallet app or the so-called “cold wallet”, please refer to our comparison of different wallets.

Information Sites

Is my transaction successful? How much Gas Price should I set to make sure the transaction will be executed? Is there any potential risk in the smart contract? Thanks to the transparent nature of blockchain technology, if you take advantage of information sites, you can easily find the answers and minimise making mistakes in these areas. Some websites also hold comprehensive data on different topics where users can explore those useful information.

• Etherscan: This website enables you to figure out whether your transaction on Ethereum network is successful or how many transactions were done before. Every record of transactions on the blockchain can be found on Etherscan, including the current status, the address of sender/recipient and used gas fee. You can search the historical transaction records of particular account by inputting the wallet address. For more advanced or technical users, you can check if there are any bugs or issues that might be a concern in a smart contract or a token contract.
• ETH Gas Station: Beginners usually feel frustrated about setting Gas Price when initiating a transaction. Enter this site to find out how much Gas Price to add for your transactions, it will recommend you the amount according to the congestion level of the network.
• CoinMarketCap: This website provides data and graphs related to trading, such as current crypto prices, market capital and price changes. There are also data for the overall crypto market, particularly coins/tokens and exchanges, so you can have a quick overview of the rapid moving market.
• Dappradar: Interested in exploring cool DApps? On Dappradar, you can find many existing DApps, browse them based on different categories and discover the most popular DApps.

Article by Jacky, JOYSO

Cover Photo on Foter.com