But its so hard! :) my strategy is to have many 3-9 side projects on at any one time, each is really just practice and I judge the concepts based on how often revisit them.
Diamond age: a young ladies illustrated primer. Anathem. Halting state. Accelerando. Rant: an oral biography of buster casey. Enders game. The laundry files.
I suppose the fact that this inserts hashes into the Bitcoin Blockchain. makes it entirely different to what ethereum is, that is not to say that something like this could not be implemented using ethereum alone.