Have you ever wondered how on Earth and why on Earth there are so many different cryptocurrencies? Also why they might even be worth money and why people actually buy these things? You may also ask what the heck is a blockchain and how is it formed or not or whatever (for further discussion). You may also ask about how to keep your coins and where (for further discussion)?
Well those are great questions. Let us get to talking about one particular famous cryptocurrency in the news plenty Bitcoin. It was the first created. The entire reason was to show an alternative way to pay for items. You see when you pay for something with Bitcoin your transaction is processed very quickly somewhere between 5 to ten minutes the person you sent the coins to will have them in their wallet. Uh oh I introduced a new term wallet. So what a wallet is, is a piece of software or hardware that looks at all the coin transactions or in this case Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain (to be explained further). Once your transactions has been verified 10 time the person will get the Bitcoins you sent. And seconds after that their wallet will show the increase in Bitcoin you sent.
What just happened is that those two people who transacted a service, buying something, or whatever with Bitcoin didn't need to use a bank. The processing of the transaction was done through people who have equipment that use processing power to process the transaction. This is called mining (I will talk further about this as well). Everyone knows what a bank is and how long it can take to get your money from them. The problem banks have besides being extremely greedy and want to keep your money as long as they can is that whenever transacting with other bank entities they need to validate themselves in all sorts of ways. This makes sure you never loose a transaction or process a transaction from a nefarious source. They also figure out anyway to charge you a transaction fee of anysort to do something with your money. The funny thing is that people used to do the job of processing your money now it is ALL done by computers using the same kind of processing power but controlled solely by the banks and thus you are stuck paying them gobs of money for your money being transfered to places. This is not so when you use cryptocurrencies. You control the transaction and the public processes your transaction. Safety in your transaction is in the blockchain which is another days subject.
Enough about banks and such let's get down to the nitty gritty of why it is useful for having so many different coins. Well if you do not know it there is a hard limit to the number of Bitcoins created. What the heck do you mean, might be something you are asking yourself right about now. Well when the inventor, supposedly this guy Satoshi Nakamoto invented the coin he limited the number to 21 million coins. He did this to try and make sure of its adoption and its use and to make sure a value will be assigned to it. The thing about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is that the public, you, me, and everyone else has control over that coin meaning no one individual or organization (banks or governments) can hog and control the coins thus making the coins free to use and readily available. This means they are a threat to the banks and governments that control money or fiat currencies. You do not need a bank to hold your currency all you need is a software or hardware wallet (I will be going into this at a later date).
Once you understand that crypto coins are good because all of them have a hard limit to their number it means that the 6 billion people or so on the Earth can obtain cryptocurrencies of all sorts for all sorts of reasons. And the value of said coins should be put on them by the people and not by banks or governments. This keeps the wealth in the peoples hands and not some other entity that you need to use in order to keep your money safe. You need to also think about why these forms of currencies are spectacular; it is because we as people want them to be. Meaning the value is what we designate not a bank or government that can print more to control things. You cannot print any more Bitcoin that 21 million. That is it. Oh and all of the cryptocurrencies have a time limit, they are quite long in time but there is a limit to them. This means they will eventually become collectors items or traded for other currencies.
You might ask yourself what good is a currency with a time limit, well because this means no one currency can have a stranglehold on the others. This also means you have a clear path as a user of that money/currency. But here is a weird part the time limit applies to the creation of new coins. This does not mean that the network will stop processing the coins. This just means no new coins will be created after the creation of the last coin. The real truth is that no one really knows what will happen just some speculation. This bodes true for our current dominant currencies like the dollar, or euro, pound, or whatever fiat currency is your choice. These currencies could go by by anytime as well. They also can be easily demonitized by political strife. We have seen this before many times.
The cryptocurrency promise is that there will always be someone there to maintain the currency and the network. Many times it is the founders and other times it is a group of volunteers. The value of a cryptocurrency should be on its usefulness to the world. I will give you a few examples of coins that are extremely useful. There are two currencies that are used to store you files in the cloud. But this is not exactly true either. I will recap a couple articles about these coins now and their links will follow. One coin is called SIA where you buy SIAcoin from an exchange. You pay SIAcoin in order to store your files on other peoples machines. There is another one called Storj that is the same, you buy on exchange and pay through the network to store your stuff there. The cool thing is that your files can be retrieved from any machine you can plug a USB into. This is because the wallet can be loaded onto this drive and executed on any computer. You might need to wait for the wallet to catch up with the blockchain but all is well you insert your password and boom files can be downloaded. There is another really cool coin a few people dreamt up. It is called SOILcoin. This coin allows the tracking of food shipments around the world. A shipment of food can have a hash from the block attached to the individual packages or just the items themselves and a consumer can check the blockchain to where those items they bought were at in the world.
So if you had no idea that cryptocurrencies went well beyond Bitcoin and Etherium you now have a glimpse into the foray of cryptocurrencies. I would also suggest that you get everyone you know to buy as much coins as possible right now while we can. The thing I see what is happening is the banks and governments are trying their hardest to disrupt the currencies and take them over. They want regulation so they can take control of the coins and you need to go through them once again to get wealthy. I say hell no do not let these bastards do this to you. Sign up with and exchange and buy coins. The price will go up because the citizens will have control over the coins and not the banks and governments. We need to revolt against this sort of manipulation and the way to do it is to take charge one person at a time.
So if you ever wondered what in the world happened to Bitcoin after it hit 19k dollars per coin, it was the banks and government colluding to take control of the coins. Look at the pattern of how the price was manipulated down to a point where people stopped buying because no one could figure out what was going on. People are scared because the banks have millions of dollars to manipulate the currencies. But if you think about it we get 20 million people in the U.S. to put 200 dollars for investment. This will be 4 billion dollars. The banks will have a super hard time manipulating the prices then. Now brokerage firms are looking into this as well. They are looking into this I am sure they want control as well.
So the lesson is get everyone you know to buy 200 dollars worth of coin from any exchange. This again as mentioned will make sure that the banks cannot get control over the cryptocurrency markets. If everyone of your friends puts money in and they encourage others to put money in for sure no one entity can get a stranglehold on the market. I do not want to go on a bandwagon of how the stock market works these days. It works in favor of people that invest with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you try and make that 100 dollars from a trade there are many computer programs trying to manipulate the price their way. The thing is they make pennies on each little transaction but they makes thousands upon thousands a day. If us citizens grab coins by mass we will take control and keep control, of course we will need to hold them but if we have millions of people trading at once on a regular basis it will be much more difficult to manipulate the market. and if they succeed in the manipulation this means that there is potential and you got in early. So freaking buy some coins already.
The other stories on SIA and Storj links below
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrecny/@chasbowie/sia-coin-how-to-host-files