I'd like to be let you out of the newbie section. I've been reading and dealing with bitcoins since at least January 2012 when GPU's could still make blocks and have high level knowledge of the high level details. I've read several of the lower deep down bits and have a general understanding. I'm more of a lurker on this forum, so I haven't made any posts yet. I don't have any specific issues to post about, just want to be involved with the bigger community.
I'm not sure what to use to prove my knowledge level. I understand the basics of a block (containing a list of transactions, including the generation transaction), why generating blocks isn't a set number of hashes (changing the nonce to try and find a sha256 hash that is numerically smaller then a constant, defined by the difficulty. Since each tried nonce is a guess, it is like wining the lottery finding the right number), why the previous description doesn't fully describe what is going on (hash contains other details, including merkle root of transaction list, which contains another nonce in the generation transaction). I basically understand client communication, with the IRC server being a seed for connections, all clients communicating with random other ones (up to 8 by default), transactions being pushed around over p2p network. Client side is done by JSON with the various requests in the default client.