Perhaps it's due to my ignorance in the field or perhaps it's because the field is pretty young: I would like to read something from the Linus Torvalds/Brian Kernighan/Richard Stevens of the crypto world.
In that case I suggest https://vitalik.ca/ and dip into articles with titles that appeal to you.
He covers a range from high level opinion essays to (imho) good technical simplified explanations of the special kinds of low-level cryptography. I've personally found the articles on how SNARKs and STARKs work very helpful.
Note that Ethereum and the other "smart contract" blockchains which link general program execution with transactions, are very different from Bitcoin and the other "money only" blockchains.
I also suggest https://ethereum-magicians.org/ if you want to get more into the guts of protocol discussions or just see them, and the Eth R&D discord.
>Note that Ethereum and the other "smart contract" blockchains which link general program execution with transactions, are very different from Bitcoin and the other "money only" blockchains.
Smart contract blockchains like Ethereum have a lot that classic blockchains like Bitcoin don't have, but all of the lessons of classic blockchains are relevant to Ethereum. The original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi is still a strong introduction to the goals and basics of cryptocurrency; understanding the goals of Bitcoin and the idea of solving double-spending in a decentralized manner is critical to understanding cryptocurrency. (But anyway after reading the Bitcoin whitepaper, just move on to reading docs about other projects like Ethereum. There's little interesting to Bitcoin beyond its initial invention.)
I wouldn't say Vitalik Buterin is anywhere near as legendary as the names you dropped, but he's the closest to what you described, in terms of being as close as possible to the underlying tech rather than just being associated with the hype train (and scam train) riding on top of it.
