Читать книгу The Book about Cryptocurrency № 1 - Viacheslav Nosko - Страница 7

You can’t touch bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency in real life; they are not minted by any mint of the world.

Although the most common and stable cryptocurrencies have their own symbols, along with dollar ($), pound (£), euro (€), ruble, etc.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist only in virtual reality. But at the same time they can be exchanged to real money.

Another difference between crypto and fiat money is that they appear in the digital space themselves. And anyone can produce (mine) bitcoin. For this, no central bank or state is needed.

Cryptocurrencies appear with help of ICO (investment), as a result of mining (maintenance of special servers) and forging – the formation of new blocks (branches) in already existing digital currencies.

Nevertheless, nowdays bitcoin and other currencies quite realistically turn into real money – into houses, apartments, travels, yachts and other pleasures.

By the way, in the first year of creation of bitcoin, a legendary transaction was carried out – the first purchase of real goods for cryptocurrency. For 10,000 bitcoins, two pizzas were bought for a total of $ 41.

The American programmer Laszlo Hanyecz spent his savings so “wastefully”. Forum thread is still available on – https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0

Now recount it according to the current rate and grab your head. Today (July, 2018 – ed.) 10,000 bitcoins are equivalent to 78 million US dollars.

The most popular kinds of cryptocurrency

According to the portal https://coinmarketcap.com/ data, in August 2018, 1890 cryptocurrencies are registered in the world.

Of course, their value is different. And the destiny of the majority of small coins can develop differently. Some coins will fly up; some will disappear from the lists of exchanges. But nevertheless, the fact remains that blockchain technology allows creating an unlimited number of types of crypto money. Their capitalization depends on the exchange rate of the main currencies (bitcoin, ethereum, etc.) and it is approaching $ 300 billion point (at the moment of writing this material – this price always fluctuates).

At the same time, the cryptocurrency market is characterized by high volatility. And that means – strong fluctuations of the rate. In a matter of days or even hours, that same bitcoin can collapse or can grow by several hundred dollars.

Hence, the potential of each new coin is pretty high. It can increase 50, 100 and even 1000 times. This allows to move crypto markets and earn on them.

Each type of cryptocurrency has its pros and cons, its value and its potential for growth.

But in total:

• they are multipurpose,

• they can be exchanged either for other crypto money or fiat money,

• they can be saved up,

• they can pay for goods and services,

• their rate is subject to demand and supply.

What are the most popular currencies now? Which capitalization (the total value of all issued cryptocurrency coins) does exceed a billion dollars?

So far, the top 20 looks like this (data from August 2018):

Bitcoin (BTC) – the very first and most widespread digital currency. All subsequent ones appeared later n its basis.

Ethereum – the authorship of the coin is attributed to Vitalik Buterin. One of the most popular cryptocurrecies.

Ripple – global settlement system. Its basis is ledger in the form of a distributed database where all data about accounts and user transactions is stored. It uses the RPCA protocol – the Ripple Protocol consensus algorithm. Cryptocurrency (but many people do not consider it to be due to centralization). Ripple is a unique code, it does not copy any of the existing systems, it is constantly updated by a very strong development team – employees of the Ripple company. Since the beginning of 2018, it has been ranked third in terms of the cryptocurrency market capitalization, second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Bitcoin Cash – cryptocurrency, fork of Bitcoin, separated from it. Branching took place on August 1, 2017.

EOS – relatively new cryptocurrency which was launched in 2017 by Block. one company. It works using the delegated proof of stake protocol (DPOS), which allows to quickly confirm transactions. The main developer of the project is Dan Larimer.

Stellar (XLM) – it is a fully decentralized consensus platform. It supports any type of currency and is equipped with an integrated decentralized exchange that can be used to trade any currency or asset.

Litecoin (LTC) – technology author is a programmer Charlie Lee. It is considered an equivalent of silver among a cryptocurrency (and bitcoin is an analog of gold).

Cardano – a decentralized public cryptocurrency project, a third generation platform developed on the Haskell programming language. The project solves the problem of quick and cheap creating of decentralized apps and smart contracts in a safe and scalable way. Entered the market in 2015.

IOTA – an open source cryptocurrency, DLT (distributed ledger)is based on the DAG (directed acyclic graph), is intended for secure and efficient data transfer and payments without fees between devices in the Internet of Things (IoT).

The next ten of the most popular cryptocurrency looks like this: Tether, TRON, Monero, NEO, Dash, Ethereum Classic, NEM, Tezos, Binance Coin, VeChain.