Is it hard to study cryptocurrency without programming background?
NO!
Cryptocurrency is more than just a software. It is a marriage of many different domains of knowledge, including business, science, engineering, law and social science. Cryptocurrency will never exist without the support of all these subjects.
For business, people with economics, finance and accounting backgrounds find cryptocurrency quite relevant to them. The core question in economics is how to allocate the scarce resource. Money has been an effective tool to distribute scarce resource for many centuries. The general public gets so used to think currency as government-issued banknotes. How about the non-government-backed cryptocurrency? Is it really currency? Some economists think even further. Can cryptocurrency affect the effectiveness of the monetary policy imposed by the central bank? Will a fixed-supply cryptocurrency stifle the economic growth? Perhaps these questions are too far away from our daily life. We may be more interested in the financial aspect of cryptocurrency, i.e. investment. At what price should I buy bitcoin? What factors can affect the long-term value of bitcoin? Even though we can anticipate the price movement with a powerful financial model, we may still lose money if the decision is based on fraudulent information. Accountants can assist investors in auditing these novel assets in a different approach.
For science, cryptocurrency is based on cryptography which is a branch of mathematics. Cryptography is a study of data encryption and how to ensure a message is not altered by malicious parties. It involves the advanced level of algebra and geometry.
For engineering, cryptocurrency falls in areas of both computer science and electronic engineering. Obviously, software engineers and coders develop programs to run the cryptocurrency but programming is just one part of computer science. The program consists of a special data structure called blockchain to store transaction information. There are still other data structures to store information in a decentralized fashion like the directed acyclic graph (DAG). Transactions cannot be carried out without the help of computer network because cryptocurrency users are from different parts of the world. The method for all independent transaction verifiers to reach consensus is also an important topic in this area. Mining is a consensus method requiring a large amount of computational resources to crack a cryptographic puzzle. Electronics engineers design special integrated chips to perform mining efficiently although it is a controversial matter in the cryptocurrency community.
Law governs how our society works in a fair way. Many governments draft legal frameworks to regulate this subject to protect investors from scams. However, because of its decentralized nature, innovative ideas are needed to effectively monitor cryptocurrency. Apart from regulations, some cryptocurrencies come with a novel feature called smart contract. It is a computer program written in programming language converted from a traditional contract. It may disrupt the existing judicial system as no lawyer and judge is required to execute the smart contract.
Cryptocurrency challenges not just the presence of judicial system but also the role of government. The ideology behind is crypto-anarchism. It aims at using cryptography to build a society with a very high degree of political and economic freedom. Studying cryptocurrency through the perspective of social science can understand why some fanatics are so eager to adopt cryptocurrency despite its poor performance and complicated setup.
Lastly, I wish you are fascinated by the high interdisciplinarity of cryptocurrency which is also the reason why I am so passionate about this matter. You will never get bored!
