What's the best way to stay current with blockchain consensus algorithms?

My opinion is slightly different. Media is here to sell. No matter what channel. With the blockchain industry, especially with its low maturity, one cannot resort to media to understand consensus protocols. When it comes to evaluating consensus mechanisms (Especially for investments), the only way is to use first principle thinking.

Everything in blockchain begins with the Bible —> the bitcoin whitepaper.. If you didn’t bother to learn what it says then you are actually arrested in your greed to make overnight money. How it helps? The bitcoin whitepaper lays the foundation; if you understood that well then you’ll easily understand all other whitepapers and hence their consensus algos.. I took help from various YT explainers to decipher the tough scientific language and ultimately sought AI’s help. Try it and you’ll see the difference 🧠

This is very underrated, yet the most important aspect in the web3 ecosystem right now. People keep chasing the hype and eventually either loose their money+time+trust and overall it hampers the integrity of the web3 ecosystem itself. What I feel is following the hype/trend is okay to keep yourself updated but also focussing on the core technology and understanding the basics is a must before chasing a new FAD out there in the market.

Depends. It is almost impossible for a lay user who cannot code to make contributions to the code of such projects. Especially if the user is making a business evaluation, adding to codebase may be overkill. Using first principle thinking and reading documentation is the way to go.

Following the developers conversation in their discord group is my way to understand what's happening. Of course, I come with a coding background and hence it makes navigating the code/project a bit easier. But , as A Product Manager, I neeed to find a business case. That's what lacking in majority of the projects I have witnessed. Open to hear more perspectives on this.

For a lay user, it is very difficult to filter through the noise and find a good event to go to. I would recommend them to try getting into high quality twitter communities before investing time and effort into meeting IRL.

This is a very subjective topic to discuss, as most events these days are just get-togethers of people chasing freebies or free beers. For a newbie who wants to be a part of the web3 ecosystem it is essential for them to understand that they need to chase the value not the flashy fairytale life which most people have pulled up as an illusion in front of the world that this space is a gold mine and conference are there to celebrate everytime, which actually shouldn't be the pull factor. The actual pull factor for people should always be the value and the foundational technology that blockchain is here for. Some of the events are definitely useful and fruitful but still the quantity is super low.

I got into web3 after making good amount of money via crypto and eventually loosing double the money I made. I learnt my lesson at a pretty early stage for sure. I would like to suggest that don't follow the influencers or media or even your fav entrepreneurs out there blindly. Blockchain space is currently is evolving at an exponential space and every Month comes up with a whole new update or a trend which definitely affects the crypto market as well. In my experience till now I have worked really closely with 2 different blockchain unicorns, helped multiple fortune 500 companies to enter web3, I can definitely say a huge percent of people enter web3 due to FOMO and not all are there to create value.