Last night, Vitalik Buterin shot off a 75-message tweet storm summarizing the history of Casper, saving blockchain nerds and amateurs everywhere hours of frustrated Googling and inaccurate reddit commenting.
If there's an open secret in the crypto space, it's that no one knows what's going on.
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts, hodlers, journalists, and developers alike: There's so much going on in the crypto space, and so many actors, that even if you're trying really hard, it's all but impossible to keep pace. Even within a single blockchain like Ethereum, because it's a decentralized, open-source project, there isn't just one place to go to get everything you need to know.
Of course, publications like ETHNews strive to provide a hub for people to learn about the most noteworthy developments, but there's plenty going on that isn't necessarily newsworthy but is still worth knowing. There are Github pages, Gitter and Youtube channels, Medium blogs, and subreddits all dedicated to Ethereum. The Ethereum Foundation[1] has links to all these and more. There's a forum[2] for Ethereum developers. There are the core devs' meetings, the plasma implementers' calls, and the reams of related information written about those calls.
It seems Vitalik Buterin has had enough of the crypto community's confusion. On August 15, Buterin posted a 75-tweet[3]-long history of Casper's development and current status. If you're not familiar (I wouldn't blame you if you're not, though you really should be), Casper is Ethereum's proof-of-stake (PoS) project.
He starts at the beginning: in January 2014, a year and a half before the Ethereum network had even launched. Halfway through 2014, Vlad Zamfir[4] joined in on the research, and "he quickly moved toward requiring validators to put down *deposits*, much
