Cryptocurrencies to invest in (long term)
ETHEREUM
Created by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum is second only to Bitcoin in the hierarchy of cryptocurrencies. Ethereum’s blockchain not only validates a set of accounts and balances but also states. This means that Ethereum can not only process transactions but complex contracts and programs.
This flexibility makes Ethereum the perfect instrument for distributed computing. In February 2017, Ethereum organization announced the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA). It is aimed at developing enterprise-focused solutions with the open-source Ethereum as a basis but that are, in some cases, more privacy-oriented. Conversely, the idea is to create a kind of positive feedback loop that leads to improvements of the public blockchain protocol as well.
There are major Fortune 500 companies, Microsoft, Intel, JP Morgan, BP, Samsung to name a few, that are all currently exploring Ethereum.
RIPPLE
One of the most hated cryptocurrency project by the community is Ripple. While Ripple has a native cryptocurrency (XRP) it is more about a network to process IOUs than the cryptocurrency itself. XRP, the currency, doesn‘t serve as a medium to store and exchange value, but more as a token to protect the network against spam.
Ripple Labs created every XRP-token, the company running the Ripple network, and is distributed by them on will. For this reason, Ripple is often called pre-mined in the community and dissed as no real cryptocurrency, and XRP is not considered as a good store of value.
Banks, however, loves Ripple. There are now over 100 banks that are currently utilizing Ripple to process transactions.
LITECOIN
Litecoin was one of the first cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin and tagged as the silver to the digital gold Bitcoin. Block transactions 7.5 minutes faster than Bitcoin, with a larger amount of token and a new mining algorithm (Scrypt), Litecoin was a real innovation, perfectly tailored to be the smaller brother of Bitcoin. Litecoin facilitated the emerge of several other cryptocurrencies which used its codebase but made it, even more, lighter. Examples are Dogecoin or Feathercoin.
Scrypt-based mining spawned a new generation of GPU mining that still exists today. Check out Growing Your Own Money (Bitcoin) Tree | Build Your Own GPU Mining Rig for Ethereum and Litecoin
While Litecoin failed to find a real use case and lost its silver status. It is still actively developed and traded. In fact, average volume for Litecoin trading is third overall only behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.
MONERO
Monero is the most prominent example of the cryptonite algorithm. This algorithm was invented to add the privacy features Bitcoin is missing. If you use Bitcoin, every transaction is documented in the blockchain and the trail of transactions can be followed. With the introduction of a concept called ring-signatures, the cryptonite algorithm was able to cut through that trail.
The first implementation of cryptonite, Bytecoin, was heavily premined and thus rejected by the community. Monero was the first non-premined clone of bytecoin and raised a lot of awareness. There are several other incarnations of cryptonote with their own little improvements, but none of it did ever achieve the same popularity as Monero.
DASH
Dash (originally known as Darkcoin) is a more secretive version of Bitcoin. Dash offers more anonymity as it works on a decentralized mastercode network that makes transactions almost untraceable. Launched in January 2014, Dash experienced an increasing fan following in a short span of time. This cryptocurrency was created and developed by Evan Duffield and can be mined using a CPU or GPU. In March 2015, ‘Darkcoin’ was rebranded to Dash, which stands for Digital Cash.
On a basic level, Dash is very fast in its standard transactions and its Instasend and Privasend features have even more functionality for a bit more of a fee, making it ideal in a retail setting. If people started using Dash only for the purpose of sending and receiving digital cash peer-to-peer payments, it would be among the best options at the moment.