Cryptocurrencies Explained, in Plain English
Everything you need to know about what cryptocurrencies are, how they work, and how they're valued.
Sean Williams
Sean Williams
(TMFUltraLong)
Jan 2, 2018 at 8:34AM
Author Bio
By now you've probably heard about the cryptocurrency craze. Either a family member, friend, neighbor, doctor, Uber driver, sales associate, server, barista, or passer-by on the street, has probably told you how he or she is getting rich quick with virtual currencies like bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, or one of the lesser-known 1,300-plus investable cryptocurrencies.
But how much do you really know about them? Considering just how many questions I've received out of the blue from the aforementioned group of people over the last month, the answer is probably, "not a lot."
The word cryptocurrency written atop semiconductor chips and circuitry.
IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.
Today, we'll change that. We're going to walk through the basics of cryptocurrencies, step by step, and explain things in plain English. No crazy technical jargon here. Just sticks and stones examples of how today's cryptocurrencies work, what they're ultimately trying to accomplish, and how they're being valued.
Let's get started.
What are cryptocurrencies?
Simply put, cryptocurrencies are electronic peer-to-peer currencies. They don't physically exist. You can't pick up a bitcoin and hold it in your hand, or pull one out of your wallet. But just because you can't physically hold a bitcoin, it doesn't mean they aren't worth anything, as you've probably noticed by the rapidly rising prices of virtual currencies over the past couples of months.
How many cryptocurrencies are there?
The number is always changing, but according to CoinMarketCap.com as of Dec. 30, there were around 1,375 different virtual coins that investors could potentially buy. It's worth noting that the barrier to entry is particularly low among cryptocurrencies. In other words, this means that if you have time, money, and a team of people that understands how to write computer code, you have an opportunity to develop your own cryptocurrency. It likely means new cryptocurrencies will continue entering the space as time passes.
Why were cryptocurrencies invented?
Technically, the idea of an electronic peer-to-peer currency was being tinkered with decades ago, but it wasn't truly successful until 2008, when bitcoin was conceived. The basis of bitcoin's creation, and all virtual currencies that have since followed, was to fix a number of perceived flaws with the way money is transmitted from one party to another.
What flaws? For example, think about how long it can take for a bank to settle a cross-border payment, or how financial institutions have been reaping the rewards of fees by acting as a third-party middleman during transactions. Cryptocurrencies work around the traditional financial system through the use of blockchain technology.
bitcoin shops In Blockchain, a 51% attack refers to a vulnerability where an individual or group of people controls the majority of the mining power (hash rate). This allows attackers to prevent new transactions from being confirmed. Further, they can double-spend the coins. In a 51% attack, smaller cryptocurrencies are being attacked.bitcoin фермы That’s all good and well, you may be thinking, but I’m not a Cypherpunk, I’m not doing anything wrong; I have nothing to hide. As Bruce Schneier has noted, the 'nothing to hide' argument stems from a faulty premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong.cryptocurrency bitcoin пополнение
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When the Fed creates $2.5 trillion in a matter of weeks, it is consolidating the power to price and value human time. Seems cryptic but it is not a suggestion that the individuals at the Fed are consciously or deliberately operating maliciously. It is just the root level consequence of the Fed’s actions, even if well intentioned. Again, the Fed’s operation (arbitrarily adding zeros to various bank account balances) cannot actually generate economic activity; all it can do is determine how to allocate new dollars. By doing so, it is advantaging some individual, enterprise or segment of the economy over another. In allocating new dollars that it creates, it is replacing a market function, one priced by billions of people, with a centralized function, greatly influencing the balance of power as to who controls the monetary capital that coordinates economic activity. Think about the distribution of money as the balance of control influencing and ultimately determining what gets built, by whom and at what price. At the moment of creation, there exists more money but there exists no more human time or goods and services as a consequence of that action. Similarly, over time, the Fed’s actions do not create more jobs, there are just more dollars to distribute across the labor force, but with a different distribution of those holding the currency. The Fed can print money (technically, create digital dollars), but it can’t print time nor can it do anything but artificially manipulate the allocation of resources within an economy. 3 bitcoin блог bitcoin сервер bitcoin download bitcoin кредит bitcoin bitcoin iphone ethereum swarm msigna bitcoin tp tether таблица bitcoin all cryptocurrency get bitcoin hacking bitcoin китай bitcoin bitcoin froggy bitcoin ann bitcoin network расшифровка bitcoin терминал bitcoin bitcoin rus blogspot bitcoin ethereum доллар simple bitcoin bitcoin бесплатные 15 bitcoin ethereum contract ethereum contracts bitcoin fast
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Unlike public blockchain infrastructures supporting the development of decentralized applications, such as Ethereum, Litecoin is primarily used only as a currency and does not support smart contracts.ethereum course bitcoin like asics bitcoin takara bitcoin
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'The worse-is-better philosophy means that implementation simplicity has highest priority, which means Unix and C are easy to port on such machines. Therefore, one expects that if the 50 percent functionality Unix and C support is satisfactory, they will start to appear everywhere. And they have, haven't they? Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.'bitcoin etherium
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If you had started mining Bitcoins back in 2009, you could have earned thousands of dollars by now. At the same time, there are plenty of ways you could have lost money, too. Bitcoins are not a good choice for beginning miners who work on a small scale. The current up-front investment and maintenance costs—not to mention the sheer mathematical difficulty of the process—doesn't make it profitable for consumer-level hardware. Today, Bitcoin mining is reserved for large-scale operations only. сложность bitcoin What is Bitcoin Mining?bitcoin расчет wmz bitcoin 2016 bitcoin знак bitcoin putin bitcoin bitcoin котировки Sharebitcoin обзор bitcoin минфин bitcoin nachrichten калькулятор ethereum bitcoin приложение bitcoin lurk The applications on Ethereum are run on its platform-specific cryptographic token, ether. Ether is like a vehicle for moving around on the Ethereum platform and is sought by mostly developers looking to develop and run applications inside Ethereum, or now, by investors looking to make purchases of other digital currencies using ether. Ether, launched in 2015, is currently the second-largest digital currency by market cap after Bitcoin, although it lags behind the dominant cryptocurrency by a significant margin. As of January 2021, ether's market cap is roughly 19% of Bitcoin's size.bitcoin scam
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That said, for clients who are specifically interested in cryptocurrency, CFP Ian Harvey helps them put some money into it. 'The weight in a client’s portfolio should be large enough to feel meaningful while not derailing their long-term plan should the investment go to zero,' says Harvey.For a slightly cheaper option, the previous Antminer product, which is the L3 (not the L3+!) will also perform very well when mining Litecoin, however, it will be as noisy as a vacuum cleaner!bitcoin scripting сборщик bitcoin bitcoin мошенники bitcoin attack переводчик bitcoin
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