Digital Coins has been in existence since 2008 with the Launch of Bitcoin as the first Cryptocurrency by Satoshi Nakomoto. Its a sad thing we don't know the true identity of the originators of the digital coin.
Since the launch of BitCoin, several other coins have emerged, some received massive public adoption while some has gone down the drain (BitConnect & co). Lets shed some light on the history of few popular coins.
| Coin | Release date | Founder | Programming Language | Hash |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | 2009 | Satoshi Nakomoto | C++ | SHA 256d |
| LiteCoin | 2011 | Charlie Lee | C++ | Scrypt |
| NameCoin | 2011 | Vincent Durham | C++ | SHA 256d |
| DogeCoin | 2013 | Jackson Palmer & Billy Markus | C++ | Scrypt |
| Ripple | 2013 | Chris Larsen & Jed McCaleb | C++ | ECDSA |
| DASH | 2014 | Evan Duffield & Kyle Hagan | C++ | X11 |
| NEO | 2014 | Da Hongfei & Erik Zhang | C# | SHA-256 & RIPEMD160 |
| Monero | 2014 | Monero Core Team | C++ | CryptoNight |
| Ethereum | 2015 | Vitalik Buterin | C++, GO | EthHash |
| Steem | 2016 | Ned Scott,Dan Larimer | C++, JavaScript | SHA-256 |
| EOS | 2017 | Dan Larimer | WebAssembly, Rust, C, C++ | -- |
Cryptocurrency is currently the most digital form of money, in 2017 Cryptocurrencies had the wildest ride since the launch of the first of its kind Bitcoin.
The spike that saw bitcoin hit the all-time high of 19,000 USD in December shocked the whole world and of course grabbed the attention of a significant number of the worlds population.
Source - Google trends
This interest led many to sought out for explanations of what digital coins are, what they are used for, their importance, how they come about and of course their uses. With a huge number of people understanding digital currencies and how swift transactions are completed without no regards to your location on earth, many now use it as a veritable tool to transfer money to friends and family in different parts of the world.
Furthermore, finance companies such as banks has fallen in tune with the latest development in the digital currency space, it is no longer a question of where the future of finance will be as it now very obviously. This insight was made profound as MoneyGram and WesterUnion who owns the largest share in the market of funds transfer across countries and continents are currently the largest investors in Ripple (a digital currency) X-Rapid and X-current protocols.
The intent is to harness the power of ripples blockchain to facilitate transactions to any part of the world in seconds.
The digital currency space is disrupting the finance space, from how money in created, diseminated transfered and valued.
Digital currency is in its early phases and its still developing and attracting large acceptence on daily basis. The one thing for sure is that Crytocurrencies are here to stay and its the future.
Thanks for reading am a lover of steemit