https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoTechnology/ is reasonably well moderated

https://bitcointalk.org/ is also a foundational forum

There’s no shortage of materials to use for self-education before you seek out a community.

Bitcoin resources: https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html

Ethereum resources: http://www.ethdocs.org/en/latest/ https://raiden.network/ https://www.plasma.io/ Vitalik’s recent scalability blog post with many links to further reading: https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-re...

All of the legitimate projects have a decent technical community, and many maintain good docs and/or blogs. Personally I find Tendermint and Cosmos very interesting, and I gained a better grasp of proof-of-stake by reading their articles.

Run your own nodes and interact with them from your favorite programming language.

After you have a grasp of the existing technologies used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, I recommend learning about the issues both are trying to tackle going forward (second layer channels, proof-of-stake, sharding). Then you’ll be in a good place to understand the alternatives proposed by newer projects, like using a DAG instead of a blockchain.

Oh, and if you’re concerned about the cost of testing on mainnet, consider running a dogecoin node to start off. It’s an early fork of bitcoin, so the functionality and interface is similar, but it’s extremely inexpensive.

It's not possible because there is no such technology. It's just a marketing word to sell ICOs

There are slack channels and of course the GitHub repos.

Do you have any links to those? Thanks

The most interesting GH Repo is here: https://github.com/ethereum/research

The forum is located here: https://ethresear.ch/

They use gitter instead of slack, I think I misremembered.

Thanks for the link. Through the forum I found two useful documents:

Onboarding packets for potential collaborators:

http://notes.eth.sg/s/rkxpeG0ff (Hello potential research collaborator! )

http://notes.eth.sg/s/rksCgM0Mz (Hello potential PLT-research collaborator!)

Awesome. Been looking for an up-to-date list of current programming language research being done for smart contracts.

P2P/decentralized in general, including but not limited to blockchain: https://gitter.im/amark/gun (super friendly crowd, focuses on the cryptography part of crypto, not the currency side)

The blockchain is already obsolete. It's all about the hashgraph now.