Cryptocurrencies are an innovative concept of exchange that is transforming the world economy in a significant way because they represent the potential democratization of finance mediated by international banking and now available to citizens thanks to the application of new technologies in the construction of data network.
More than a decade before the emergence of cryptocurrencies, the British cryptographer Adam Back developed in 1997 the algorithm or data test known as "hashcash", which would be essential for the development of digital currencies, and on which the creators of the bitcoin to extract new coins.Brief history of cryptocurrencies
In 1998, the computer and cryptography engineer Wei Dai laid the foundations for modern cryptocurrencies with his "b-Money" proposal, in which he describes a distributed and anonymous electronic money system that uses cryptography as a means of control. In the same year, Nick Szabo contributed "bit gold", a digital commerce method that required users to complete a work function test with cryptographic solutions. Some time later, in 2004, Hal Finney, a developer and cryptographic activist, devised a currency system based on a reusable work test (RPOW) following the principles of Dai and Szabo.
In 2008, the effects of the financial crisis stimulated a new trend in the markets towards the decentralization of global finance. Millions of people had seen their savings disappear in a massive bankruptcy of banks and pension funds around the world, caused by the lack of financial regulation. The non-transparent management that governments gave to this situation caused great mistrust among citizens, who were forced to seek alternative savings and investment other than banking.
In this context, new technologies and citizen motivation led to the emergence of the collaborative economy, a system of decentralized market management networks that has brought about a paradigm shift in important sectors of the economy, which has been accompanied by the birth of cryptocurrencies with the concept of Block Chain (or Blockchain), used for the first time in 2009 to support the operation of bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency to enter into operation.
The bitcoin was born as an initiative of a group that used the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto for the creation of a system of electronic exchange, decentralized and anonymous, that does not depend on governments or banking entities and in which the privacy and autonomy of the users is maintained. . To do this, they implemented the Block Chain protocol, a registry that guarantees the transparency of each transaction, which is distributed and shared by all the users of the system, since it is designed to avoid its modification once a data Has been published. The first transaction with the bitcoin was made in January 2009 between Nakamoto and Hal Finney, creator of the RPOW, who was also one of the first people to undermine this cryptocurrency.
The bitcoin was cemented in the cryptographic functions SHA-2 (now in SHA-256) and in the PoW scheme (work proof), foundations that served for the development of other cryptocurrencies such as namecoin, litecoin, peercoin, ethereum and monero, each one with its own conceptual and technological principles.
In October 2009, the exchange rate for the bitcoin was established when New Liberty Standard opened a service to buy and sell the digital currency, with an initial exchange rate of BTC 1,309.03 per dollar, which was equivalent at that time to eight. hundredths of a cent per bitcoin. The rate was derived from the cost of the electricity used by a computer to generate or mine the cryptocurrency. In July 2010, Jed McCaleb established the MtGox bitcoin exchange market, the first of its kind. In that same exchange house, on February 9, 2011, the bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar for the first time.
In April 2011, the first altcoin or alternative cryptocurrency, the namecoin, was introduced, which added the innovation of a decentralized domain name system (DNS). In 2012, peercoin was launched, a cryptocurrency that operates under the participation test principle. A system that allows the verification of transactions to be easier. That same year, ripple was made public, a digital currency managed by a private company that runs a network of global financial transactions. The fact that a large number of financial institutions have partnered with ripple has raised suspicions of being a product of banking sectors to face the threat posed by the bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for their interests.
In March 2013, the bitcoin capital market exceeded one billion dollars. In October of that same year, the first electronic bitcoin ATM was opened. In July 2015, the Ethereum project was launched, proposed by the Russian Vitalik Buterin, a platform that introduces the concept of intelligent contracts, exchange applications that benefit from the security provided by the Block Chain. These contracts are open source and can be used to safely execute a wide variety of services. In March 2015, the NEM collective (New Economy Movement) presented its XEM cryptocurrency, based on a point-to-point Block Chain platform, which introduces new features to this technology, such as the importance test algorithm (POI).
In July 2016, ethereum classic appears, a bifurcation of the Ethereum Block Chain. That same month, IOTA was launched, an open source accounting technology that allows the exchange of information and value between machines on the Internet of Things. Iota is the cryptocurrency that is used to transmit value through this protocol. IOTA is not based on the Blockchain system, since it uses an innovative architecture called Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). It makes it possible that there are no commissions and that the network increases its capacity as the number of users increases.
In December 2016, the seven main cryptocurrencies are defined and they continue to rise: bitcoin, ethereum, dash, ethereum classic, monero, litecoin and ripple. In May 2017, there were already more than 1,000 different cryptocurrencies. In August 2017, the bitcoin branch called bitcoin cash was created.
On March 20, 2018, the initial offer of currencies (ICO) of the Venezuelan crypto currency El Petro began, the first to be backed by the reserves of natural resources of a national state in the world. The Petro will be initially backed by oil, but later it will also be backed by gold, gas and diamonds. El Petro transactions are registered by the Blockchain Observatory of Venezuela.
Technological development will continue to promote the transformation of the economy in a decisive way and computer technologies such as the Block Chain, Big Data or the Internet of Things (IoT) will play a crucial role in this process. The decentralization of the economy that has been facilitated by innovations such as the Blockchain will give way to the Internet of Value, where the intermediation of powerful sectors in the market of assets and services will be diminished until their disappearance.
In any case, the history of cryptocurrencies is just beginning and we will write it