Ethereum made a lot more sense once I understood the basics of blockchain, not just the buzzwords

When I first started learning about Ethereum, I kept running into the same problem: I understood what people were saying, but not why it worked. Smart contracts, gas fees, consensus, scaling - it all felt fragmented unless you already had a solid mental model of blockchain itself.

What helped me was stepping back and learning the fundamentals properly instead of jumping straight into ecosystem specifics.

I ended up reading Crypto for Dummies: A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Not Losing Your Mind (or Your Money), and it surprisingly helped me understand Ethereum better, even though it starts with Bitcoin. Once the core ideas clicked - how distributed ledgers work, why consensus matters, what “trustless” really means — Ethereum stopped feeling abstract.

Things like:

• why gas exists at all • why network congestion affects usability • why L2s and scaling solutions are even necessary • why decentralization comes with tradeoffs 

all started to make sense instead of feeling arbitrary.

I genuinely recommend the book if you’re trying to understand Ethereum at a deeper level, not just follow updates or narratives. It doesn’t try to hype anything - it just explains the system clearly, which makes learning Ethereum much easier afterward.