> Where should one go to learn how all of these systems work?
Here's the path I'd suggest:
1) If you have no basic understanding of blockchains, read Satoshi's Bitcoin original paper, and Ethereum's Yellow paper.
2) Read about ERC-20 [1][2], to understand what "tokens" really are (TLDR: basically a hashtable stored in the ethereum blockchain, containing a mapping of balances to addresses, and the expectation that you must implement a standard API to be considered an ERC-20 token)
3) Learn about Solidity. The language is dead simple if you have any programming background (preferable C, but not too different than Rust/Python/Go), although it takes some time to wrap your head around the idea that the state is stored permanently in the blockchain. There's plenty of tutorials, but I found Ivan on Tech [3] to be excellent, and Moralis Academy [4] if you want something more structured (plus they offer many other courses in this area).
Solidity documentation [5] is also excellent. And Remix IDE [6] makes it really easy to experiment and run your "hello world" solidity programs in a simulated environment, without worrying about deploying to testnet, faucets, etc.
Here's the path I'd suggest:
1) If you have no basic understanding of blockchains, read Satoshi's Bitcoin original paper, and Ethereum's Yellow paper.
2) Read about ERC-20 [1][2], to understand what "tokens" really are (TLDR: basically a hashtable stored in the ethereum blockchain, containing a mapping of balances to addresses, and the expectation that you must implement a standard API to be considered an ERC-20 token)
3) Learn about Solidity. The language is dead simple if you have any programming background (preferable C, but not too different than Rust/Python/Go), although it takes some time to wrap your head around the idea that the state is stored permanently in the blockchain. There's plenty of tutorials, but I found Ivan on Tech [3] to be excellent, and Moralis Academy [4] if you want something more structured (plus they offer many other courses in this area).
Solidity documentation [5] is also excellent. And Remix IDE [6] makes it really easy to experiment and run your "hello world" solidity programs in a simulated environment, without worrying about deploying to testnet, faucets, etc.
[1] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-erc20-and-what-does-i...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILw-7mplRlI&list=PLo0ddf4DBU...
[4] https://academy.moralis.io/
[5] https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.11/
[6] https://remix.ethereum.org/