Ditto above. Crypto is cool & awesome today - but hard telling what will be the next big thing.  Think ahead for the next 20-30 years, not the next 2 years.  Get a degree in the underlying tools & concepts under IT and cryptography.   Make sure to take a Data Structures class - probably & most useful best class I ever took.

I have long held that 6 months of real-world employment is worth more than a 4 year degree.  There's far too many people that have parked in college, think they are awesome, but are totally useless at doing anything but taking classes.  You're better off getting out there and doing the job, and taking classes on the side - IMHO.

Getting something to prove your skills with crypto is still in its infancy. There's this cert, but not sure how widely recognized it is:
https://cryptoconsortium.org/certifications/CBP

If you want a good free textbook, the all of "Mastering Bitcoin" is online - best deep dive I have found yet.
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/mastering-bitcoin/

Reddit used to be a good source, but is dead now. It's just a battleground between BCH & BTC - with most subs deliberately confusing/deceiving newbies.

I have CoinDesk's RSS feed as part of my daily news intake, but honestly everything there is old news.

Crypto-Twitter seems to be the best source, but you have to find & curate your follow list to get anything besides shilling.  The FF (Follow Friday) lists are a good place to start.

A related question: what happens when a node gets saturated with connections?  
I can imagine that the first few servers in the known servers list at startup get a ton of requests.

I found 2 paywalled archives - but it's not clear if these are archives of Paper editions, or Web editions.
Would love to see both.

https://www.gale.com/uk/c/the-times-digital-archive

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

Our favorite headline.

We know that The Times is a UK newspaper, but does that mean that Satosi got his hands on a dead-tree version?
Most of them were in the UK.  What was the paper distribution like, outside of the UK?

2009 was late enough that many newspapers had an online presence.  Best I can tell, The Times did have an online presence then - but I can't find any archives to show what that day would have looked like.  Was it free & open, or registered?  Was there a difference between the paper and online headline / story?

If Satosi was using a web version of the newspaper, then all we know from the Genesis block was that he was a regular reader of the online version- from somewhere on earth.

Let's say I start up a new full node, with nothing but the code & the embedded Genesis block.  My node then asks nearby nodes for blocks to build up my chain.

As I start getting blocks 1, 2, and 3 from 2009, is each block validated using today's current rules?

I'm thinking that there has to have been ancient blocks in the chain that, at the time were valid, but new security rules have since made them invalid.
For example, does famous block 501726 still cause problems?

If I start up a BTC full node, it connects to a small number of other nodes. (is it 8?)  How do I really know that I'm connected to all other bitcoin nodes? It seems that it would be possible that somehow I connected to a small subset of nodes that only know about the subset - like a high school clique that only talks to people at the cool kids table.

For example, with bit torrent, it's not unusual to have lots of little groups that don't know about each other.  Digging up a long list of seeds gets better results than just one seed & what it knows about.

With Bitcoin, that could be a very bad thing.  Are there mechanisms in place to prevent or detect this?

In BTC, each block has a Bits field with a rounded representation of the actual difficulty, which was calculated from the last 2-week adjustment.

Why do blocks have this Bits field in it?
Everything else about blocks feels like they are calculated whenever possible, keeping things compact with no redundant data.

Doesn't having a less precise version of the true difficulty cause problems?  What happens when a new block is generated, which is valid according to Bits, but is not good enough to meet the true difficulty?

I am confuse.