The Bitcoin network overpasses 500 million transactions

The Bitcoin network overpasses 500 million transactions

by | Feb 6, 2020 | Bitcoin, News

Bitcoin transactions are over 500 million as of the beginning of February 2020. The number of transactions doubled in 3 years, from 250 million in 2017 to 500 million in 2020.

The Bitcoin network went live on January 3, 2009. Eleven years later, in 2020, the network processes over 500 million transactions.

Since 2017, Satoshi.info, named after the pseudonym of the presumable creator of Bitcoin, started tracking and recording the number of transactions on the Bitcoin network.

The data on Satoshi shows a constant increase in the Bitcoin transactions, year after year. In only 3 years, the volume of Bitcoin transactions has doubled and considering the same growth rate, Bitcoin transactions can exceed 1 billion transactions.

How did the community react to the 500 million milestone?

Now, on to the next 500 million.

Is Rolling Back the Bitcoin Blockchain Possible and What Would it Do to Bitcoin?

Is Rolling Back the Bitcoin Blockchain Possible and What Would it Do to Bitcoin?

by | Jun 6, 2019 | Bitcoin, Blockchain, News

In May 2019, Binance lost over 7,000 bitcoins, valued to over $40 million.

The CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao (CZ) demonstrated that after talking to different parties, he chose to not pursue the re-org strategy for “revenge” on the hacker(s) that was able to steal money from the cryptocurrency exchange

The hack included one trade that transferred roughly 7,074 BTC from Binance’s hot wallet. While CZ thought that reversing the Bitcoin blockchain was possible, he confessed it would not be worthwhile to do this, even for its $40 million which were stolen.

The re-org would observe miners essentially collude to make an alternative continuation of their blockchain rooting out of prior to the block which comprised the hackers’ transaction. This alternative continuation would have to grow quicker than the present one to possess more proof-of-work and watch all of Bitcoin customers re-org for this, accepting it as legitimate.

In its set of experts for doing so, CZ mentioned it might dissuade future hacking efforts, and start looking into how the Bitcoin system would cope with this type of circumstance. The outcome would probably be the end of this, as it might ruin the cryptocurrency’s immutability, and influence consumers’ confidence in it.

Presently, Bitcoin is regarded as a store-of-value and also a kind of electronic gold. Employing the cryptocurrency, whales can move tens of thousands of dollars for exceptionally tiny quantities in fees, which makes BTC a superior asset that is also helpful for remittances and regular transactions.

However, what if miners were to create a cartel to pull a 51% attack on the Bitcoin blockchain to undo trades? This is basically what was at stake if CZ chose to rollback the blockchain, and could most likely hurt Bitcoin’s reputation. Who’d wish to transfer millions using BTC in case the blockchain was not immutable?

Since Nic Carter, a partner at investment firm Castle Island Ventures in Boston, place it through a Telegram message, Bitcoin’s value proposition is based on miners not colluding, like they do this they could”selectively censor, invalidate, or interfere with transactions.” He said :

More to the point if this kind of behavior becomes mainstream — deep reorgs to reverse valid transactions — then Bitcoins settlement assurances are impaired. People will lose confidence in Bitcoin’s ability to settle large transactions.

The Ethereum Precedent

The ones who are involved in the crypto area for some time know that blockchain trades have been reversed before. As soon as the DAO applications on Ethereum watched a hacker stealing 3.6 million ether (worth ~$70 million at the time), the Ethereum blockchain had to perform a hard fork in order to please everyone and to move on after the hack.

At the moment, the Ethereum blockchain was rather young,  but even so, it was a controversial move. Some viewed the hack an unethical, but legitimate movement, and opposed regaining the funds. This saw the community divide, with a few staying on the first blockchain, now called Ethereum Classic (ETC) and fans of ETC chain’s immutability.

Ever since then, various Bitcoin fans have remained away from Ethereum entirely. Commenting on the recent proposal to rollback the Bitcoin blockchain Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum co-founder, noted that rolling back wasn’t even an option.

Ethereum did a surgical irregular state change. We never even considered actually rolling back the chain to undo the hack; the collateral damage from that (reverting a day of *everyone’s* transactions) would have been huge and possibly fatal.

The billionaire founder of Galaxy Digital Michael Novogratz said that bitcoin is currently viewed as a legitimate shop of riches, which also has a market cap of over $100 billion. Affecting its immutability and standing could see its worth dip.

Some think CZ chose against the rollback since he would not have the ability to pull it off. Miners about the Bitcoin blockchain understand that if they had been to create a cartel to hinder trades, the value of BTC would plummet.

A reorg to recover exchange losses is like a bail-out for a bank mismanaging risk.

Fortunately, it’s so hard to pull off and so likely to fail that unlike banks, there won’t be a bailout here.

Those who fail security get to eat the cost.

@aantonop

This might signify that the 7,000 BTC they’d get paid will be worth a great deal less than $40 million if they would perform a roll back the Bitcoin blockchain. Needless to say that this would impact their company in the long term. As another result of a theoreticall rollback, would be a fall of the hashrate, which makes it much easier for bad actors to pull on a 51% onto it and double-spend coins or mess with all the blockchain.

Even though it is possible, messing with the base of hope on which Bitcoin sits, could put a stop to this flagship cryptocurrency. The simple fact that the most significant cryptocurrency exchange considered a rollback of the Bitcoin blockchain and realised it wasn’t possible, it’s a positive indication of Bitcoin’s immutability.

5 Bitcoin facts you should know before starting trading cryptocurrency

5 Bitcoin facts you should know before starting trading cryptocurrency

by | Jun 4, 2019 | Bitcoin

The blockchain is a technological milestone, not just for the currency world, but for the entire world and industrial fields of activity. As a newbie to crypto and blockchain, it will be hard to understand or to clarify its accomplishments. But every crypto enthusiast should know some basic bitcoin facts before starting trading cryptocurrency.

How important are Bitcoin and the blockchain technology, Bitcoin’s underlying technology? As Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said:

“Bitcoin is a technological show of power.”

Here are a few Bitcoin facts you should know before starting trading cryptocurrency:

 

1. Satoshi Nakamoto Is extremely wealthy

The creator is Bitcoin is Satoshi. That’s how he declared himself to be called in the early stages of Bitcoin. Later on, he disappeared, and today nobody knows how he looks like. We don’t even know if he is just a person or a group of people. To this day, the identity of Satoshi remains a mystery, but what we know is that he has lots of Bitcoin. It has been estimated that Satoshi mined around has around 980,000 BTC.

2. The US government possesses Bitcoin

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin might have been created to eliminate the need of a central authority and the need of government to regulated it, but the reality is that the FBI has the second largest Bitcoin wallet following Satoshi Nakamoto.

In late 2013, the FBI shut down Silk Road, an internet drug market, and began seizing Bitcoins belonging to Ross Ulbricht (also known as Dread Pirate Roberts), the operator of this illicit website.

At the moment, the seizure led to a great deal of debate about the cryptocurrency’s future. That’s how today the FBI controls over 144,000 BTC.

3. A private key is necessary to access your Bitcoin

As I mentioned before, Bitcoin was created keeping in mind the inutility of governments and regulatory organs. But there is one big downside to the way Bitcoin works.

Because there is no third party “watching” over your assets, you wouldn’t be able to recover the access to it in the eventuality of a forfeit or theft.
If you were to lose your credit card, let’s say you would accidentally throw it in the trash without noticing, you would be able to contact the back and verify your identity, and they would issue you another card and declare null the old one.

Well, in regards to Bitcoin, it is not really simple. Bitcoin uses private keys to grant access to its owner. ‘a private key is basically a large string of numbers or combination of words.  In the event you misplace your private key, you are going to lose all of your coins. Forever!

Actually, back in 2013, IT employee James Howells lost access to 7,500 Bitcoins, which were estimated to roughly $127 million at the moment. He stated that he accidentally threw the hard disk on which he stored the private key.

4. Bitcoin distribution is Limited

Central banks control the production and supply of traditional money. They can always print more money, and nothing is backing it up.

But, Bitcoin is restricted to only 21 million. Currently, over 17.7 million Bitcoins are circulating, and the last coin is due to be mined in 2140.

5. Bitcoin cannot be prohibited

It’s fairly easy to understand why governments don’t easily embrace the idea of Bitcoin or any other decentralized currency, but the fact is that the cryptocurrency cannot be prohibited, it can only be controlled.

The system was created in such a manner that so long as you have an online connection and a Bitcoin wallet, then you can purchase and swap the cryptocurrency.

These are some basic facts about Bitcoin you should know before starting trading cryptocurrency, which you can now easily explain to your friends. But trading requires more than this basic knowledge, so please make sure to do all the research required before trading.

January 2019: Cryptocurrency Review

January 2019: Cryptocurrency Review

by | Feb 4, 2019 | Bitcoin, News

Goodbye 2018, Hello 2019

What happened to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in January 2019? How did the crypto market perform and what other cryptocurrency news should you look after? Find out some of the cryptocurrency highlights of January 2019.

This is the chart for Bitcoin for January 2019.

bitcoin january 2019 review

The new year started slowly for the crypto market, as it was bouncing between a high of $135.4B and low of around $125B. The first week ended with a market cap of $129B – slightly under a 6% weekly gain.

Cryptocurrency Market Stats (1/4/2019)

Cryptocurrency Market Stats (1/4/2019)The second week of January left us with a drop in the crypto market, with a $123.2B market cap, a 4.5% drop on the week. Most of the top cryptocurrencies saw red during this week as well, with the exception of Tron (TRX) which actually grew 23.71%.

Cryptocurrency Market Stats (1/11/19)

Cryptocurrency Market Stats (1/11/19)A rather uneventful week was the third week of the year. The total market cap was at around $122B.  Most individual cryptocurrencies stayed within single-digit gains and losses. A few exceptions were Augur (56.85%), Chainlink (20.45%), and TenX (78.94%).

Cryptocurrency Market Stats (1/18/19)

Cryptocurrency Market Stats (1/18/19)

The fourth week started on a positive note but ended up being a disappointment for cryptocurrency prices. The cryptocurrency market cap dropped about 1.6% and currently sits at $120 billion. The only coins showing any double-digit movement were Waves (12.99%), Holo (76.98%), and Factom (14.59%) among a few others.

Cryptocurrency Market Stats (1/25/19)

Cryptocurrency Market Stats (1/25/19)

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain News

31st December 2018 

The online retailer Overstock announced it would pay a part of its Ohio state business tax using Bitcoin.

The state will charge a 1% fee on payments made with Bitcoin, which is less than the 2.5% service fee on credit card payments.

7th January 2019

Some northern Nevada areas are utilizing blockchain to store computerized version of government records like birth and marriage certificates.

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) published a proposal for using blockchain for air traffic data. They describe it as “an open source permissioned blockchain framework to enable aircraft privacy and anonymity while providing a secure and efficient method for communication with Air Traffic Services, Operations Support, or other authorized entities.”

8th January 2019

Nick Szabo, one of Bitcoin’s earliest developers, spoke at the Israeli Bitcoin Summit. During his presentation, he made a bold claim, “There’s going to be some situations where a central bank can’t trust a foreign central bank or government with their bonds…a more trust minimized solution is cryptocurrency.”

10th January 2019

Darren Soto, blockchain’s biggest fan on Capitol Hill, told Cheddar.com this week that the SEC shouldn’t have jurisdiction over most cryptocurrencies. He stated that “securities laws can be very intense”, which inhibits the growth of blockchain technology.

15th January 2019

The state of Wyoming proposed a bill to legalize the tokenization of stock certificates for corporations. Beyond stock issuance, the bill would make voting via blockchain legally binding as well.

Blockchain companies are beginning to notice too. IOHK, the development company behind Cardano, has announced plans to relocate from Hong Kong to Wyoming.

16th January 2019

Exchange owners reacted to Cryptopia’s recent hack. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) outlined the risks of storing funds yourself, encouraging users to only store coins on reputable exchanges or, even better, decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

17th January 2019

Professors from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley will attempt to create a new cryptocurrency with faster transaction speeds and the same core decentralization principles of crypto. The new crypto, Unit-e, will allegedly process up to 10,000 transactions per second utilizing a new form of sharding.

Unit-e is the first project under Distributed Technology Research, a non-profit for creating decentralized tech and backed by investors such as Pantera Capital.

18th January 2019

The Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities (DoBS) talked about the classification of cryptocurrencies: “only fiat currency, or currency issued by the United States government, is ‘money’ in Pennsylvania.” This classification means that cryptocurrency exchanges and kiosks like Bitcoin ATMs are not required to get Money Transmitter Licenses (MTLs).

According to the DoBS, to require an MTL, “fiat currency must be transferred with or on behalf of an individual to a 3rd party, and the money transmitter must charge a fee for the transmission.” As crypto entities exchange fiat for crypto directly, they do not qualify. This is great news for cryptocurrency businesses, but they still have to follow the stricter rules of the federal government and other states in which they wish to operate.

22nd January 2019

CNBC hosted a panel in Davos, Switzerland. Here are some memorable quotes regarding Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology from the discussions:

Jeff Schumacher (Founder, BCG Digital Ventures): “I do believe [bitcoin] will go to zero. I think it’s a great technology but I don’t believe it’s a currency. It’s not based on anything.”

Glen Hutchins (Chairman, North Island): “The way to think about the value of the tokens is as a derivative of the use value of the protocols they enable.”

Brad Garlinghouse (CEO, Ripple): “The long-term value of any digital asset is derived from the utility it delivers.”

Edith Yeung (Partner, 500 Startups): “I think it’s a really good thing that now the crypto secondary market has, in some way, fizzled out because the people who are here now building are the ones that really believe in the technology.”

 

What is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)?

What is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)?

by | Oct 16, 2018 | Bitcoin, Crypto wiki, Cryptocurrency

Based on their site, Bitcoin Cash is defining itself: “Bitcoin Cash is peer-to-peer electronic cash for the Internet. It is fully decentralized, with no central bank and requires no trusted third parties to operate.”

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is comparable to Bitcoin in several ways, beginning with its own name. But let us say the differences out:

  • The blocksize is 8 MB.
  • It will not have segwit.
  • It will not have the “replace by fee” feature.
  • It’s going to have replay and wipeout protection.
  • It features a means to correct the proof-of-work difficulty faster compared to normal 2016 block issue modification period located in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Cash is due to a hardfork, which occurred on August 1, 2017. In 2017, Bitcoin has come under a great deal of criticism because of its scalability problems that has given rise to lots of disagreements that are politically in addition to ideologically motivated.

The end result was this tricky fork that gave birth to Bitcoin Cash.

What’s a hardfork?

The main difference between a gentle fork and hardfork is the fact that it isn’t backward compatible. When it’s used there’s absolutely no going back at all.

If you don’t combine the updated version of this blockchain then you don’t get access to some of those newest updates or socialize with users of this new system at all.

You can not play PS3 games on PS4 and also you can not play PS4 games on PS3.

hardfork bitcoin cash

Andreas Antonopoulos Clarifies the difference between Soft and Hard fork like That:

If a vegetarian restaurant could opt to add pork into their menu it could be regarded as a tricky fork. If they’d opt to add vegetarian meals, everybody who’s vegetarian might still eat vegetarian, you do not need to be vegetarian to eat there, you might continue to be vegetarian to eat meat and there eaters could eat there also so that is a tender fork.

But for any significant modifications to take place in bitcoin, the machine should come to a consensus. So, how can a decentralized market come to an arrangement on anything?

At the moment the two largest ways that are attained are:

  • Miner Activated: Fundamentally changes which are voted by miners.
  • User-Activated.: Changes which are voted on by people with busy nodes.

This is where Segwit arrives to perform a role.

What’s segwit?

To be able to comprehend why bitcoin money is, it’s necessary to get some notion about exactly what segwit is.

Once you closely analyze a cube, this is exactly what it seems like:

blockchain block looks like

Image: Riaz Faride

There is the block header of course which has 6 elements in it, namely:

  • Version.
  • Previous block hash.
  • Transaction Merkle roots.
  • Epoch time stamp.
  • Difficulty target.
  • Nonce.

What does a Bitcoin transaction consist of? 

  • The sender details which is the input.
  • The receiver details i.e. the output.
  • The digital signature.

The digital signature is really important because it is what verifies whether the sender really has the required amount of funds needed to get the trade done or not.

But there is a big issue with it. Space which already is in limited availability as a result of its 1 MB block size. In reality, the signature accounts for nearly 65 percent of the space taken by a transaction!

Dr. Peter Wuille has produced a remedy for this, he predicts it Segregated Witness aka Segwit.

That is what will occur once segwit is activated, all the sender and receiver details will go inside the primary block, however, the signatures will move into a new block known as the “Extended Block”.

what is segwit

Segwit will create more space in the blocks for more transactions.

Pros of segwit:

  • Increases a number of transactions that a block can take.
  • Decreases transaction fees.
  • Reduces the size of each individual transaction.
  • Transactions can now be confirmed faster because the waiting time will decrease.
  • Helps in the scalability of bitcoin.
  • Since the number of transactions in each block will increase, it may increase the total overall fees that a miner may collect.

Cons of segwit:

  • Miners will now get lesser transaction fees for each individual transaction.
  • The implementation is complex and all the wallets will need to implement segwit themselves. There is a big chance that they may not get it right the first time.
  • It will significantly increase the usage of resources since the capacity, transactions, bandwidth everything will increase.

When the programmers built SegWit they included a particular clause for this. It may only be triggered when it’s 95% acceptance in the miners. After all, it’s a massive shift in the machine and they guessed that acquiring a great majority was the best way to go. But this caused a disturbance in the system. Many miners do not desire segwit to be triggered. They’re frightened that because the available block distance increases, it will radically reduce the transaction fees which they can get. Because of this, they stalled segwit that subsequently infuriated the consumers and companies who desperately desire segwit to be triggered.

What’s a BIP?

There are 3 Types of BIPs:

  • Standards Track BIPs: Changes into the system protocol, trade, and cubes.
  • Informational BIPs: Coping with design problems and overall guidelines.
  • Procedure BIPs: Changes into the Procedure.

What’s BIP 148?

The BIP 148 is an individual triggered soft fork i.e. a gentle fork that’s been triggered from the users. What it says is that each one of the full nodes at the bitcoin networks will reject all blocks which are being generated without segwit ingrained inside. The concept is to inspire the miners to place segwit activation from the cubes they mine in order for it to be a part of their machine.

It’s estimated that by encouraging an increasing number of miners to return into the BIP 148 side, finally the 95% threshold limitation is going to be spanned and segwit is going to be triggered. You will find fictitious fears of a series divide occurring but that is easily prevented if only 51% of those miners come around to the BIP 148 side. Have over half of those miners, on the other hand, will significantly lessen the hash speed of this heritage chain i.e. the initial series.

Going from the coordination game-theory, the miners will be forced to return to another side with most. This nevertheless raised a critical concern. Imagine if the shift over does not occur smoothly and suppose that it can cause a valid chain divide? This may spell tragedy and this is the specific difficulty raised by the mining firm Bitmain.

What’s the UAHF?

The User Activated Hard Fork is a proposition by Bitmain that will allow the building of a completely different sort of bitcoin and cubes with bigger dimensions. Because this is a tricky fork, the series won’t be backward compatible with the remainder of the bitcoin blockchain. The largest reason why this seems so attractive is the tricky fork doesn’t expect the vast majority of hashpower to be enforced. All nodes that take such rule set changes will automatically stick to this blockchain irrespective of the service it receives. At precisely the exact same time, a lot of individuals simply were not pleased with the notion of signatures being stored separate from the remainder of the trade information, they believed it to be a hack.

If you do not like it then jump boat and you are able to be part of the new series.

Since Bitcoin money is due to a hardfork, anybody who owned Bitcoin money got the equivalent number of coins at BCH PROVIDED they did not possess their BTC in trades and have been in possession of the private keys in the right time of their hardfork.

Among the greatest characteristics of Bitcoin Cash is the way that it circumnavigates among the largest issues that any cryptocurrency may confront post-forking, the replay attack.

Bitcoin Cash: What’s a replay attack?

A replay attack is information transmission that’s maliciously replicated or postponed. In the circumstance of a blockchain, it’s taking a trade that occurs in 1 blockchain and maliciously replicating it in a different blockchain. Eg. Alice is sending 5 BTC into Bob, below a replay attack she’ll send him BCH also, although she never supposed to do this.

(data are obtained out of Andre Chow’s response in pile exchange)

These transactions are invalid on the non-UAHF string as the various sighashing algorithm will lead to invalid transactions. Any transaction which includes this series will be considered invalid by bitcoin money nodes before the 530,000th block. Fundamentally, before that obstruct you’ll be able to divide your coins by transacting on the non-UAHF series with the OP_RETURN outputsignal, then transacting on the UAHF series next.

How can Bitcoin Cash draw miners?

Any cryptocurrency depends greatly on its own miners to operate easily. Recently, bitcoin money has attracted a great deal of miners that has considerably improved its hash pace. This is how they did this.

Bitcoin money has a set rule regarding when it reduces its own difficulty. It’s the median of the previous 11 blocks which were mined at a blockchain. Fundamentally, line up the previous 11 blocks one after the time where the centre block is mined is that the median time beyond this set. The MTP helps us determine the exact time where future cubes can be mined also. Here’s a graph of the MTP of different blocks:

blockchain mtp

Image: Jimmy Song Medium article.

This is the principle for difficulty alteration in bitcoin money: In the event, the Median Time Past of the present block, as well as the Dominion Time Past of 6 cubes prior to, is higher than 12 hours the problem reduces by 20% i.e. it becomes 20% easier for miners to locate newer blocks. This offers the miners some ability to correct an issue, eg. Check out the 13-hour gap between cubes 478570 and 478571. The miners might have only been doing so to create the cubes easier to mine.

Another interesting point to notice is how and if the problem rate can adjust to a cryptocurrency. This is a chart which monitors the problem rate of BCH:

difficulty rate adjustment in cryptocurrency

Image source: Bitinfocharts.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem rate adjusts based on numerous miners from the computer system. Whether there are fewer miners, then the problem rate goes down since the entire hashing power of this machine goes down. When bitcoin money first began it was fighting a little to get miners, consequently, its issue dropped down radically. This, in turn, attracted many miners who discovered that the chance to be quite lucrative. That triggered an exodus of miners out of BTC so much to ensure that the hashing ability of BTC halved, decreasing the trade time and raising the prices. Reports on social websites said that BTC trade has been taking hours and even days to finish.

Here is the graph that shows the drop in hash rate of BTC:

difficulty rate adjusts

Image source: Investopedia

The value of Bitcoin Cash

At the moment of writing (October 2018), Bitcoin Cash is the second most expensive cryptocurrency, after Bitcoin (BCT), trading at $461.43 for 1 BCH.

chart bitcoin cash bch october 2018

Image: CoinMarketCap

Nobody can forecast what is going to occur to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash or some other token or cryptocurrency. The effect which Bitcoin Money might have on Bitcoin, later on, is unforeseeable.

What we do know is this is actually the first time that anybody has hardforked out of BTC whilst retaining the documents of the present transactions. What we have here is a really interesting experiment that can teach us many lessons moving ahead.

At precisely the exact same period, the 8 mb block dimension is absolutely an extremely sexy facet and it remains to be seen just how this impacts the miners in the long term. Can this address all of the scalability problems? Can BCH ever overtake BTC and eventually become the main string? These queries are only speculations for the time being. What we can say for certain is that we’ve got a rather interesting future ahead.

Top 20 Cryptocurrencies (2019)

Top 20 Cryptocurrencies (2019)

by | Oct 15, 2018 | Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Litecoin

The cryptocurrency market has become crowded, with new cryptocurrencies coming out daily, while old ones disappear faster than ever. Let’s check out the top 20 cryptocurrencies, as they appear on coinmarketcap.com

1. Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is the king of the crypto world. To most, it’s interchangeable with”cryptocurrency.” Its objective is to extend a peer-to-peer digital model of money to permit payments to be routed online with no necessity for a third party (like Mastercard).

The rapid increase in Bitcoin’s cost has caused an explosion of fresh Bitcoin investors. With the massive growth in interest has come an increase in retailers accepting Bitcoin as a valid type of payment. Bitcoin is quickly moving towards its objective of being a currency accepted globally.

Read more on What is Bitcoin?

2. Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum is the revolutionary platform that brought the concept of “smart contracts” into the blockchain. First released in July 2015 by then 21-year-old Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum has quickly risen from obscurity into cryptocurrency celebrity status.

Buterin has a complete team of developers working supporting him to further develop the Ethereum platform.

Ethereum has the power to process transactions quickly and cheaply over the blockchain very similar to Bitcoin but also has the ability to run wise contracts. Think about automated processes which can perform just about anything.

Read more on What is Ethereum?

3. Ripple (XRP)

Ripple aims to improve the speed of monetary transactions, specifically international banking transactions.

Anybody who has ever sent cash globally knows that today it now takes anywhere from 3-5 business days to get a transaction to clear. It is quicker to draw money, get on a plane, and fly to a destination than it would be to ship it! Transaction fees are generally around 6%, but it can vary based upon the financial institution.

Ripple’s objective is to earn these trades fast (it only takes around 4 minutes for a trade to clear) and economical.

The Ripple team now comprises over 150 people, making it among the largest from the cryptocurrency world. They’re headed by CEO Brad Garlinghouse, with an impressive resume which includes high rankings in different organizations such as Yahoo and Hightail.

Read more on What is Ripple?

4. Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash was created on August 1, 2017, after a “hard fork” of the Bitcoin blockchain. For a long time, a debate has been raging in the Bitcoin community on whether to increase the block size in the hope of relieving some of the community bottleneck which has plagued Bitcoin due to its increased popularity.

Because no agreement could be reached, the original Bitcoin blockchain was forked, leaving the Bitcoin series untouched and in effect creating a brand new blockchain which would allow developers to modify a number of Bitcoin’s first programmed features.

Generally, the debate for Bitcoin Cash is that by allowing the block size to increase, more transactions can be processed in precisely the same amount of time. Those opposed to Bitcoin Cash assert that increasing the block size will increase the bandwidth and storage requirement, and in effect will cost out normal users. This could cause increased centralization, the exact matter Bitcoin set out to avoid.

Bitcoin Cash doesn’t have a single development group like Bitcoin. There are currently multiple separate teams of developers.

Read more on What is Bitcoin Cash?

5. EOS (EOS)

Billed as a possible “Ethereum Killer,” EOS suggests improvements which can challenge Ethereum because of the prominent smart contract platform. 1 main issue EOS appears to enhance is the scalability issues that has plagued the Ethereum platform during times of high trade volume, specifically during popular ICOs.

A possibly more profound gap EOS has, compared to Ethereum, is the way in which you use the EOS network. With Ethereum, every single time you make modifications or interact with the network, you have to pay a fee. Together with EOS, the creator of the DAPP (decentralized program ) can foot the bill, while the consumer pays nothing. And if you consider it, this is reasonable. Would you need to pay each time you post something on social media? No, certainly not!

Along with this, EOS includes a few other technical advantages over Ethereum such as delegated proof-of-stake and other routine changes. Just know that EOS has some serious power under the hood to back up the claim of “Ethereum Killer.”

EOS was created by Dan Larrimer who’s no stranger to blockchain or even start-ups. He has been the driving force behind numerous successful projects in the past, for example, BitShares, Graphene and Steem.

Read more on What is EOS?

6. Stellar Lumens (XLM)

In brief, Stellar Lumens attempts to use blockchain to create very fast international payments with little fees. The network can handle tens of thousands of transactions a second with only a 3-5 second confirmation time.

As you may know, Bitcoin can sometimes take 10-15 minutes to get a trade to affirm, can only deal with a few transactions a second and, in turn, has very high transaction fees.

This sounds much like Ripple! Stellar Lumens was founded on the Ripple protocol and is attempting to do similar things. Some of Stellar Lumens’ main uses will be to making small daily payments (micropayments), sending money internationally, and mobile payments.

Stellar Lumens is focusing on the developing world also, more specifically, the dollar industry of researchers who send money back to their own family in impoverished nations.

The Stellar Lumens group is led by Jed McCaleb, who’s worked in a number of successful startups in the past such as eDonkey, Overnet, Ripple, along with the notorious Mt. Gox.

Read more on What is Stellar?

7. Litecoin (LTC)

Very similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin is a peer-to-peer transaction platform designed to be utilized as an electronic currency. Because of some noteworthy technical advancements, Litecoin is able to handle more transactions at lower prices. Litecoin was made to process the tiny transactions we create daily.

Litecoin is referred to “digital silver” while Bitcoin is known as “digital gold” This is because traditionally silver has been used for little daily trades while gold was used as a store of wealth and was not used in regular life.

The Litecoin blockchain is a fork from the Bitcoin series. It was originally established in 2011 when its founder, Charlie Lee, was still working for Google. Well-known as a cryptocurrency expert, Charlie Lee is backed by a solid development team who seem to be achieving what they set out to perform. They have recently attained a very notable accomplishment using the first successful nuclear swap.

Read more on What is Litecoin?

8. Tether (UDST)

Tether is a cryptocurrency token issued on the Bitcoin blockchain. Each Tether coin is allegedly backed by one US Dollar. The target is to facilitate transactions with a rate fixed to the USD.

Amongst other things, Tether looks to resolve a number of the legal issues which could arise when trading cryptocurrencies also it aims to protect people from market volatility.

Tether has faced controversy concerning their business model, and some believe it a scam.

Read more on What is Tether?

9. Cardano (ADA)

Cardano is a smart contract-focused blockchain. It was originally released under the title Input Output Hong Kong by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, Some of the first team members of Ethereum, and afterwards rebranded into Cardano.

Cardano is hoping to correct some of the largest issues the cryptocurrency world which have been causing continuing problems for many years like scalability issues and democratized voting.

They have the potential to challenge Ethereum’s dominance in the smart contract world. Cardano is growing their own programing language similar to Ethereum; however, they’re focusing heavily on being interoperable involving other cryptocurrencies.

While some cryptocurrencies are all bite but no bark, Cardano is quite the opposite. They are quietly focusing on strong software which will be wholly open-source.

Cardano’s team contains some of the greatest minds in the market, and they seek to create a solid foundation which others may build upon for many years to come.

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10. IOTA (MIOTA)

IOTA has seen lots of the problems Bitcoin and Ethereum have with the PoW (Proof-of-Work) and PoI (Proof-of-Importance) versions and seems to improve them with their revolutionary transaction validation network only called “Tangle.”

When issuing a transaction in IOTA, you affirm two previous trades. This means that you no longer outsource validation to miners which necessitates wasteful amounts of computing power and also normally a large bet of coins. These necessary resources are, in effect, centralizing the monies which many believe were created to be decentralized in the first place.

With IOTA, the more energetic that a ledger is, the more validation there’s. In other words, the more individuals using it, the quicker it gets. You do not have to subsidize miners, so there are no charges on transactions. That’s right: zero.

The IOTA team was actively growing blockchain technology since 2011, and established the IOTA foundation and company in 2016. Since its emergence, the group has been continuously growing, bringing exceptional talent from around the world.

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11. TRON (TRX)

As stated in TRON’s whitepaper, “TRON is an attempt to cure the internet.” The TRON founders think that the world wide web has deviated from its initial intention of enabling people to freely create articles and article as they please; alternatively, the world wide web was taken over by huge corporations like Amazon, Google, Alibaba and many others.

TRON is attempting to take the internet back from these types of companies by building a free content entertainment program. This will make it possible for users to openly store, publish and own information, giving them the capability to determine where and how to talk.

The project is directed by creator Justin Sun, that has been listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 list double (in 2015 and 2017). Additionally, Sun is a protĂŠgĂŠ of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, China’s former Ripple representative along with the creator of Peiwo APP.

Sun has built a powerful team with heavy hitters including Binshen Tang (creator of Clash of King), Wei Dai (founder of ofo, the biggest shared bicycles provider in China), also Chaoyong Wang (founder of ChinaEquity Group). Sun has also secured the aid of a few notable angel investors such as Xue Manzi.

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12. Monero (XMR)

Monero is a digital currency made to be used as a totally anonymous payment system.

A common misconception with Bitcoin is the fact that it is completely anonymous. In reality, all payments processed around the Bitcoin network are recorded on a public ledger (blockchain), so Bitcoin is actually only partially anonymous or “pseudonymous.”

This usually means that you can, in theory, trace back every transaction a coin has been involved with out of its creation. Though users are not able to inherently connect the people key on the blockchain together with the private keys used to store the coins themselves, there’ll always exist a correlation between the two.

Monero has solved this issue by implementing cryptonic hashing of receiving addresses, therefore dividing the coin out of the address it is going to. This can be hugely valuable for anybody wanting to hide their buys.

The Monero development group consists of 7 core developers, only two of which are publicly known. There have been over 200 additional contributors to the project and software updates are implemented every six months or so.

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13. Dash (DASH)

Dash (that comes from “digital cash”) intends to be the most user-friendly and scalable cryptocurrency on the planet. It has the capacity to send money instantly confirmed by “double-send-proof” safety with the extra functionality of erasable trade history and the capacity to send transactions anonymously.

Much like Bitcoin, Dash is supposed to be utilized as electronic money but has some added values such as much faster transaction times and reduced fees. For a slightly higher fee, Dash has the additional role of “minute send” which permits transactions to be verified almost immediately. This is only one of the principal selling points of Dash because most believe this attribute would allow it to be utilised in physical establishments.

The Dash development team is made up of over 50 members and is directed by former financial services specialist Evan Duffield.

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14. Ethereum Classic (ETC)

Ethereum Classic came after a hard fork of Ethereum in 2016. The fork has been a consequence of the infamous DOA hack where around 50 million bucks worth of Ethereum was stolen due to what was considered an oversight in the code.

The blockchain was forked so as to recover the losses from this attack, but a small portion of the community did not want to go back and alter the initial blockchain. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and subsequently the development team opted to go with the hard fork and operate on what’s now “Ethereum” today.

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15. NEO (NEO)

A top platform for smart contracts and occasionally referred to as “China’s Ethereum.” NEO (officially Antshares) expects to digitize various forms of resources that were formerly kept in more conventional means, and so make it feasible to utilize them in smart contracts.

To envision a potential use case of NEO, consider digitizing the name to a house to a wise advantage, then setting up that asset to automatically transfer to a different person after payment for the home was received. This would be, in effect, a simple smart contract.

NEO founder Da Hongfei is a leading body in the cryptocurrency world, and it has worked on several blockchain jobs previously. The development team is made up of 6 in-house investors and a large community of third-party programmers.

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16. Binance Coin (BNB)

Binance Coin is the coin used to facilitate operations around the Binance system, a cryptocurrency market that’s capable of processing 1.4 million orders per second. The name “Binance” is derived from the combination of the terms “binary” and “finance,” referring to the integration of digital technology and fund.

The BNB coin is used to cover exchange fees, withdrawal fees, listing fees, and the rest of the possible trade expenses on the Binance platform. To be able to incentivize new customers to perform their cryptocurrency trading on Binance, the group is offering discounts when BNB is used to cover fees. The reduction will be 50% in the first year, 25% in the second, 12.5% at the third, and 6.25% in the fourth year prior to the discount ends.

Binance was mostly marketed to Chinese cryptocurrency investors initially, but they also have English, Korean, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Russian versions of this platform.

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17. NEM (XEM)

NEM (New Economy Movement) is the world’s first Proof-of-Importance (PoI) enterprise built on the blockchain technology. With a concentration on business use cases, the program was built from the ground up with adaptability in mind. NEM’s aim is for companies to utilize their “smart asset system” to execute customizable blockchains. A wise asset could be almost anything: a cryptocurrency token, a company’s stock or a business’s invoicing and documents.

Some possible use cases for NEM’s technology include voting, crowdfunding, inventory ownership, keeping protected records, loyalty rewards point applications, mobile payments and escrow services.

The Growth of NEM is monitored by the Singapore-based NEM Foundation.

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18. VeChain (VET)

As described in VeChain’s growth plan, the organization’s purpose is to construct “a trust-free and distributed business ecosystem based on the Blockchain technology self-circulated and expanding.”

They plan to do that by producing an efficient trustless small business ecosystem to greatly reduce the ineffective information transport systems of now.

Some of the places and industries the VeChain platform is focusing on include eliminating counterfeiting in the fashion and luxury industry, food safety tracking systems, digitizing maintenance in the vehicle industry and several other worldwide supply chain processes.

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19. Tezos (XTZ)

Tezos is a smart contracts platform hot off their exceptionally successful and contentious ICO. Tezos is currently working to create a cryptocurrency “commonwealth” in which the holders of XTZ tokens have the ability to vote in new protocols, which will effectively give users complete control over the future of the blockchain.

In addition, this permits for Tezos methods to change and improve overtime, instead of requiring the radical changes every now and then that tend to lead to challenging forks.

With Tezos, users can vote for rewards to be allocated to programmers who are making excellent contributions to jobs, and therefore incentivizing the growth of the platform.

Tezos has a few technological differences compared to Ethereum like using dPoS, the exceptional ability to upgrade without needing a fork, and proper confirmation which allows for code to be mathematically proven to be correct. This is very beneficial in the case of sensitive calculations needed in fields like aircraft design and atomic development.

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20. Zcash (ZEC)

Zcash is a worth transfer protocol forked off the Bitcoin blockchain. Zcash can be utilized like Bitcoin, with a few additional improvements. With “zero cash technologies,” Zcash protects the amount transferred and the senders, making trades truly anonymous.

Zcash is one of those newest kids on the block from the world of “private trades”

An interesting note is that Ethereum is in the process of implementing some of Zcash’s technologies to allow trades on the Ethereum network to be anonymous too.

Zcash has been developed by the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company. They have had some fantastic successes, most notably JP Morgan’s announcement that they’d apply Zcash’s privacy technology to Quarum, a tech JP constructed on Ethereum.

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Bonus coin: DOGECOIN (DOGE)

Dogecoin is a peer-to-peer digital payment system based on the popular 2013 meme of the Shiba Inu dog. It was a branch of Luckycoin, which was a fork of Litecoin. The coin uses a PoW script mining algorithm very similar to Bitcoin; nonetheless, while Bitcoin includes a restricted number of coins, there’s absolutely no limit to the amount of Dogecoins which can be created. The current rate of Dogecoin creation is over 5,000,000,000 coins per year.

Dogecoin is among the oldest altcoins in life, and for that reason, they possess a relatively large community. The Reddit webpage has about 90,000 shibes (the group name to get their community members).

Dogecoin is a great coin to utilize for microtransactions and is commonly used for tipping on articles. The coin is a kind of self-proclaimed “joke coin” that has gained a lot of popularity.