I've been building in crypto since 2020 self-taught, and mostly by doing the hard version first.
I didn't start with tutorials or a bootcamp. I started with elliptic curve math, ECDLP, and Bitcoin's puzzle addresses — writing Kangaroo and BSGS implementations to actually understand how keys, signatures, and address derivation work at the bit level. That rabbit hole led me into hardware wallet security research (Coldcard), brain wallet weaknesses, and eventually post-quantum cryptography.
Then I did the thing most people only write threads about: I built a