INTRODUCTION
Bitcoin and altcoins are virtual coins in the common parlance. They are otherwise known as virtual currencies, digital currencies, digital cash, cryptocoins, cryptotokens, cryptocurrencies and other descriptive combinations of adjectives and nouns.
These virtual coins are not coins, in the traditional sense of fiat coins. They are mere digital representation of value in alphanumeric characters—units of exchange in letters and symbols. A bitcoin wallet address for instance, would have 64 bits. This is the public key to receive bitcoin from other peer addresses. Private key is the gateway to the bitcoin money. Without private key to decrypt public key, access to spend is not granted.
BITCOIN HISTORY
Bitcoin was created by a pseudonymous character called Satoshi Nakamoto (Dorian Prentice), a Japanese-American. Satoshi Nakamoto was a cryptographer and computer scientist. The first bitcoin transaction took place on the 3rd January, 2009 between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney, where 50 bitcoins were sent by Satoshi Nakamoto to Hal Finney's bitcoin wallet address. 21,000,000 bitcoins would be mined at the set date in 3rd January, 2140.
This was the first codebase transaction from the first block of the legacy chain (the bitcoin blockchain). This block of bitcoin transaction first mined is known as Genesis Block. From this first bitcoin transaction date, almost a billion payment transactions have been performed on the bitcoin blockchain. There have also been many forks hard and soft from the legacy chain and, many other blockchains have been built, and continue to be built. Other Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) like Hashgraph have been built. Yet, the future is a long way to go.
HISTORY OF ALTCOINS
Bitcoin held sway in the coin market a number of years, until ethereum came along as the first altcoin, karmacoin, mastercoin (omni), and all the rest of the altcoins have been coming, and keep coming. El Petro, a Venezuelan government's coin joined the cryptocoin gang of late.
The top coins are bitcoin, ethereum, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), litecoin, ripple, dash, IOTA, monero, NEM, NEO et al. Outside bitcoin, altcoins number 1,567+ in circulation, with IOTA as the altcoin sans blockchain, though uses crypto-hash function.
The always tentative coin market cap of all cryptocoins is $332,668,581,981 x amount of minutes ago. ICO tokens in a world of their own are a multi-billion dollar growth industry oozing meteoric flashes of hope, adoption and mainstreaming.
Ps: Maiden blog post here, guys. Testing waters.