Topic: Best Whitepapers to Read as a Beginner? (Read 212 times)

I would definitely start with the official Bitcoin whitepaper to understand cryptocurrency in its very essence. Otherwise any altcoin whitepaper you read is just an alteration with some somewhat new variations but ultimately is the same concept. After you are done reading, and most importantly, understanding Bitcoin, the next step is for you to read how Ethereum works. That will give you a higher focus on how smart contracts work and in what ways they can be used.

Everything else is not really all that necessary unless you want to be an expert in Blockchain.

I think it also depends on the project. Some of them has a technology which are too hard to understand for a common individual but in simple terms, they can contribute a big thing in the blockchain and crypto world as they can solve other existing problems in here.

There are also projects which use cases are only easy to understand like for example it was only a crypto exchange or a gambling site. The terms that are being used on them are less jargon. You just need to hang out often in this space and make it a habit to read stuffs related to them. If there are terms that you don't understand, you can copy them and search their definition in Google. You'll soon be good at them. Okay, buddy? Good luck!

@OP each project has their own whitepaper and there's no such best whitepaper. A beginner don't need to learn all thing, you just need to learn how it's work, the security and the reason you invest in that project. If you read many whitepapers of altcoins project, you will get confused.

Terrible idea, asking Chatgpt to summarize it will give inaccurate definition and each whitepaper project is differ to another one, you can't expect it will summarize all of technical words in one. I will not be surprised if user will call Bitcoin fee is gas fee, decentralized exchange is uniswap and other misleading information.

For a complete beginner I will not recommend to gather information from whitepaper of bitcoin and others because its more technically oriented so for an average joe it can be really confusing even lead to not choose to invest so I will recommend the documentary or short fils if how blockchain works which eventually give us better understanding in 20 or 30 mins video then we can go for reading the whitepaper then it will be easier for us to understand.

I'll be frank that whitepaper in general means nothing what matters most is the execution itself, you should see whether the devs are truly capable enough in getting their plan turns out to be true.
in the past where ICO flourish, there were so many whitepapers generated that it become irrelevant to understand whitepaper and always considers them as just only a gimmick, but if you truly wanna read some white paper why don't you try out their light paper first, usually the simplified version of whitepaper.

Start with the bitcoin whitepaper ~ https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

This is the best to start with if you're wanting to learn more about whitepapers. So, it's like reading the OG of whitepapers.

Honestly, getting into the technicalities of these whitepapers won't really be that much because for many altcoin projects, their contents are even not entirely different.

The concept have been passed on one project to another and they'll just improve it with what they're working on based on their projects.

Checking or comprehending a project whitepaper is one of many things that some people mindlessly suggest. If you are new to cryptocurrencies spaces, then making an assessment or analysis of a project, I'm sure you will have a hard time understanding it, especially if you are coming from a non-technical background.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind is nearly 99.9% of cryptocurrency projects are scams. So good luck separating the wheat from the chaff by reading a whitepaper. There is a lot of factors that you could extract the gist from a project without focusing on the whitepaper. Take example Bitcoin or Ethereum, both coins have a strong community, so if you want to understand them, try to seek a learning material that is designed for general people, instead of the technical stuff.

An White Paper can be attractive and well written but in the end, it is just a presentation of a project. It can be copied or stolen from other projects and apply minimum changes on it.
In my opinion, the first white Paper anyone should read and understand is the Bitcoin WP, because it is basically the genesis of the rest of the WP we see today.

Also, I have got the impression that the developers feel like using roadmaps nowadays to explain their objectives, rather than a WP. Perhaps it is because the Roadmap can be more flexible than a PDF document.

My opinion is that if someone is categorized as a beginner, it can be difficult to understand the jargon and technical concepts in cryptocurrency whitepapers. Some of the whitepapers that are considered beginner friendly including the original Bitcoin whitepaper, Ethereum whitepaper, and Litecoin whitepaper can be a little hard to understand where this is going.

I think don't be afraid to ask questions and seek clarification, because the cryptocurrency community is often friendly and willing to help. Remember to approach whitepapers with a critical mindset, analyzing a project's potential risks and benefits before investing.

Hard to teach though if you are not incline to technicalities from what you read in the whitepaper, so I will advise you to:

* everything that you read in the whitepaper that you don't understand then, search for it and try to grasp
* might as well read some and go over this community, again you can ask, just like what you did here
* or you can go directly to the project itself and ask them in their have ANN  thread in this community

Hopefully this tips help you and best of luck finding the right project who have to invest based on their whitepaper.

I don't know if it's only me, but right now, I don't think that reading a whitepaper is still an important one whether you will invest into that project or not.

In the past, yes Whitepaper is a big factor because you will see everything about the project there. Their tokenomics, the roadmap of the project, the team behind it, the possible upgrades of it etc. etc. Now on the other hand, I've also seen Whitepapers who is very alluring and very attractive to investors, but they ended up scamming others. I've read some good whitepapers which if you read it, you will think that "The whitepaper is good, I will invest into it." especially if you are a newbie investor, but they ended up as an abandoned project.

I'm not investing into new projects in the past, and until now, but I've read some whitepapers already, and the ones that I've read ended up either as an abandoned coin (most of the time) or a scam coin. Like others here, I know that reading whitepapers isn't essential anymore. Reading whitepapers is just a waste of time for others. Some might disagree with me, but that's what I observe base on my experiences in the past. As for the OP (if he will read this), it would be better if you will just pick and invest into the top coins instead of spending your time reading whitepapers that will end up as a fail project.

just use some AI to get the key takeaways from the whitepaper and you're set, honestly most of the time, average joe in investing shouldn't really dive into the whitepaper since it's so unnecessary to read such long whitepaper just for the sake of analysis, if your purpose is investing, then reading their tokenomics and their general idea of their project is enough, but regardless if you want to understand these whitepaper anyway, try to understand some technical term beforehand so you will understand what they're trying to say.

What is your goal? What is your background? What do you want to learn from whitepapers?

I have seen a lot of well-written whitepapers here but still ended up dead after few months of launching the project.
The OP can always head to the ANN board, and see a lot of projects with whitepapers.
Just browse and read some of them and he will have idea what they are trying to say.
Much better if you can read various WP so you will have idea on different levels of technicalities they have to say.
For me, there's no best whitepaper to read because it depends on how the team will implement their objectives.

Instead of reading whitepapers, I would say that you need to educate yourself first in cryptography and mathematics if you can, so you can understand the basics of the technical aspects most of important coins are about.

Do not be afraid of math and science, just because a whitepaper has a lot of color and no math, it does not mean it will be a successful project. Actually, good projects are those that can give something different to the world in terms of technology and cryptographic security. Look for example at Monero.

If a coin has a poor whitepaper which cannot appeal to people who have actual knowledge, then I would doubt of it.

If you have problems understanding it then you better learn it so that you will understand everything you read in a whitepaper especially Crypto related information that is crucial in crypto field. ChatGPT could be useful to summarize what you didn't understand or make a summarize about it but using it for other purposes is frown upon in this forum especially when you are using it to post something here in the forum.

As they say, everything does not happen immediately, and the first thing to do is to communicate. Here on the forum or on other similar sites. Feel free to ask questions and don't be afraid to be perceived inappropriately. I know from my own experience that sensible people will always help you and advise you to read articles, for example, on this or that issue. Because a healthy interest is welcome and you are on the right track.

If those whitepapers are old enough you could just use programs like chatgpt to summarize them to you like you wouldn't have highscool level of education or something like that. And if you have have an access to chatgpt4 you can do that with any whitepaper.

And i admit that some whitepapers are very technical, like the team would have included yellow papers in them. But just looking at the paper that's too technical doesn't help you so yo could just ask from the team if they have eli5 versions of their white papers, vision papers or one pagers. If they don't they are not doing a very good job with their pr. In most cases they want to explain their tech to everyone out there and if you need a phd to understand the basics of the tech, i am not so sure it will be adopted so easily.

Basically, there is not a lot of important things that can be taken from whitepaper. Most people here already understood that the main point from whitepaper must be what product that will be developed and how tokenomic will be used by the project. You can try to search some whitepapers that are already been made by the major project like arbitrum, optiomism, or something else. The fact that if most of people didn't care so much about what was already contained by the whitepaper caused by im sure if almost all of whitepapers have contained almost the same idea but with a different ways to execute it. Try to read some whitepaper and you will understand what i meant. To be honest, the concept that is already mentioned in whitepaper sometime can be changed in the middle of execution.

There are many projects were doing it. Im not whitepaper is not so important but it's pretty much a useless thing these days as people knew what concept that used by the project by seeing the name of the project. Sometime slogan is enough to explain everything related to the project.
The most important thing from whitepaper these days is tokenomic for that token that will be issued by the developers.

First I will advise you familiarize yourself with blockchain most used words first as a beginner that's the first thing I think you should do. 

Then you can actually look for books that deeply lecture and educate you about the entire blockchain environment: how it works, why this is called that, etc. 

Another thing you need to learn again is safety. There are lots of scams and fraud in this crypto space, and as such, I will urge you to educate yourself on how to identify possible scams and ways to avoid them. When you are done with all this, you can choose the white paper of your preferred project, that is to say, you should consider reading the white paper of any project you find interesting, and from their you can learn and understand more things about the project. But always note that not everything written down on the white papers of these new projects is true; some of them are just formulated promises to convince their targeted audience that they are worth investing in, so always base your choice on your research and findings. 

I think it is quite normal for someone that is not familiar with IT and that is not a programmer or coder himself to not understand all those formulas, equations and symbols that are often used in a technical whitepaper. It will not really help you to read other technical whitepapers in my opinion. To really understand all those equations you basically would need to study IT and programming for a few years or at least a few months. I don't think though, that it is really necessary to have profound coding knowledge in order to be able to get a feeling if a project has potential or not. There are many other things stated in whitepapers that should be understandable for everyone. Like the problem that the team wants to solve, the way they want to solve that problem, the roadmap and the tokenomics for example.

Like what technical languages don't you understand? You don't have to deep dive into these things yet if you have no prior knowledge of basic coding. I remember watching some youtube videos before that kinda strips downs or explain some concepts in layman's terms. That's a pretty good start for me when I was just a beginner but my knowledge today is still nothing compared to those who really know how to code.

Well I see a lot of material for beginners, and you can easily search through a few tools. But let's change your mindset a little bit about how to approach what you think is best, if you're just starting to learn about Bitcoin, the Bitcoin whitepaper is an essential read. . This is the first document written by Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008, describing how Bitcoin works and how it was designed to solve the problem of traditional currency. However, if you want to read a white paper on Bitcoin, author Andreas Antonopoulos wrote a very famous and easy to understand white paper on Bitcoin called "Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies". This book provides an in-depth look at how Bitcoin works, how it is used, and how it can change the way we interact with currency.

I find myself reading Whitepapers and barely understanding any of the technical languages or being able to formulate any form of assessment or analysis. I was hoping anyone would have recommendations for me and/or others on this forum to read to truly gauge many of the concepts and technicalities.

*EDIT* This is my first post and am extremely thankful for all of the advice! This forum appears to be very hospitable, thank you, everyone!