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Where Does Crypto Come From? The Crypto Mines (Sometimes)
ОглавлениеSo where does cryptocurrency come from? Cryptocurrency can be mined – the least common form, though the one you’re evidently most interested in based on your interest in this book — or it can be pre-mined.
To say that a cryptocurrency has been pre-mined, or is nonmineable, simply means that the cryptocurrency already exists. The blockchain is a ledger containing information about transactions. When the blockchain was first created, the ledger already contained a record of all the cryptocurrency that the founders planned for. No more will be added; it’s all there in the blockchain already.
In fact, although we hear a lot about cryptocurrency mining, the majority of cryptocurrencies (at the time of writing, more than 2,000 different flavors) are pre-mined: 74 or so of the top 100 cryptocurrencies are nonmineable, and overall, around 70 percent of all cryptocurrencies cannot be mined.
An example of a pre-mined currency is XRP, often known as Ripple, which is currently the second biggest cryptocurrency (in terms of market capitalization — that is, the value of all the cryptocurrency in circulation). XRP is stored within the RippleNet blockchain.
When the Ripple blockchain was created, 100 billion XRP were already recorded in the blockchain, although most had not been distributed. The founders of Ripple held 20 percent, and even now almost 60 percent of the currency is not in circulation.
Another example is Stellar, a payment network originally funded by the Stripe payment service, which at the time of writing was the fourth largest cryptocurrency. Stellar has a total supply of more than 100 billion lumens, 2 percent of which were assigned to Stripe for its investment.
So, no, not all cryptocurrencies can be mined (in fact, most can’t). But that’s not why you’re reading this book, now, is it?
The good news, though, is that you can mine around 600 cryptocurrencies (though you’ll never want to mine the vast majority). To decide which ones to mine, see Chapter 8.