Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or under a denial of revolutionary technology, you must have heard of these buzzwords like “cryptos”, “blockchain”, “bitcoin”, “cryptocurrency” etc. All these technologies are set to uplift the way transactions (and pretty much everything else) is undertaken over a network.
Cryptocurrencies are shattering expectations and financial predictions. To put it into a more comparable perspective, the Cryptocurrency market cap hit an all-time high of $800 Billion, and is anticipated to hit the $1 Trillion mark by the end of this year. Such a massively triumphant sector, and a lot of people are mostly unaware about the true definitions and principles underlying this great big revolution in the tech and financial industry. Cryptocurrency investment in 2018 has made people millions of dollars, and proven that cryptos are just like any other currency, only just better.
“Cryptocurrency is such a powerful concept that it can almost overturn governments.”
-Charlie Lee, Creator of LiteCoin
There’s a lot of scepticism surrounding cryptos (short for cryptocurrencies). In most cases, this degree of doubt comes from an obvious lack of knowledge about the entity. And in the case of cryptos, this absence of apprehension is much prevalent. What stands as a messiah in a world where we have to entrust our financial abilities to third-party institutions like Banks, many see it as just a mere fad. This is the perspective we’d like to alter with this article, empower you with all the knowledge on cryptocurrencies, and make you realise the capabilities yourself.
“Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. It’s completely decentralized with no server or central authority.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto, 9 January 2009, announcing Bitcoin on SourceForge.
Bitcoin, was the first cryptocurrency introduced to the world. But it only stood as a by-product of what the inventor actually aimed at developing. Satoshi Nakamoto, an online pseudonym, introduced in 2008 a “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. The basis of this development was to completely eliminate the central entity and the trust-based system.
This was achieved by the principle of Blockchain, which is the technology behind cryptocurrencies. In a decentralized network, every single entity of the network does the job of keeping a record/ledger. Every peer in the network needs to have a list with all transactions to check if future transactions are valid or an attempt to double spend.
Cryptocurrency is a medium of exchange, created and stored electronically in a cryptographically encrypted ledger known as the blockchain across all the peers in a network. Miners are the peers on the network who provide processing resources and algorithms required to legalise the transactions going around the network, and they get rewarded in that cryptocurrency for the doing the same.
This ensures that the transactions stay legal, records keep clean and the network wholly decentralised.
Presence and Evolution
Cryptocurrencies are now widely accepted as a form of payment on major international platforms, just like any other currency. Bitcoin, Ethereum, LiteCoin and XRP are some of the most popular cryptocurrencies. They are traded and are exchanged for other services and commodities. Cryptocurrency price rate and rise in those prices are also observed as with any other currency. Exchange rates are set according to the market trends.
Cryptos have certain properties and features which makes them far more favourable to use than other currencies. Dealing in cryptocurrencies provide you with concrete irreversibility of transactions, a secure online pseudonymous profile, permission less method of exchange and boundlessly quick transactions completely indifferent of your physical location. Cryptos are under a controlled supply and unlike the money in your bank, they represent the quantity themselves and not a debt policy. These features make a lot of difference with how our transaction principles stand as compared to those of the banks’ and governments’.
Evolution of cryptocurrency trading has been ever-occurring since its introduction. You give something and then get something, and same is the case for cryptos. You can buy cryptocurrencies from a number of trading platforms, exchanges and wallets. Generally stated against the dollar, the prices of cryptos keep on fluctuating. Government actions for or against cryptos, market liquidity and multiple other factors define this price.
Crypto exchanges provide a platform for users to buy, sell and exchange cryptocurrencies. You can even exchange a commodity like gold or silver for these cryptos through exchanges like Digital Ticks Exchange, which is the first and only commodity-crypto exchange with a secure, reliable and easy to use application. The evolution of cryptocurrency exchanges is now underway, with such amazing platforms.
There’s much more to know about cryptos, the underlying principles and technologies and the applications. More and more people are to know about it and accept it as a medium of payment and exchange. It will take time, but it is to revolutionise multiple industries.