January 2019: Cryptocurrency Review

by Iulia Vasile | 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)

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 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.”

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What is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)?

by Iulia Vasile | 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:

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:

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:

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.

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) What is EOS? →

Top 20 Cryptocurrencies (2019)

by Iulia Vasile | 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.

Read more on What is Cardano?

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.

Read more on What is IOTA?

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 protégé 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.

Read more on What is TRON?

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.

Read more about What is Monero?

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.

Read more on What is Dash?

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.

Read more about What is Ethereum Classic?

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.

Read more about What is NEO?

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.

Read more on What is Binance Coin?

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.

Read more on What is NEM?

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.

Read more on What is VeChain?

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.

Read more on What is Tezos?

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.

Read more about What is Zcash?

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.

← What is Fintech? What is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)? →

What is Bitcoin and what is the technology behind Bitcoin?

by Iulia Vasile | Oct 5, 2018 | Bitcoin, Crypto wiki, Cryptocurrency

What’s Bitcoin? Have you heard anyone asking about bitcoin technology?

What’s it used for and just how to receive it? Here’s all you will need to learn whether you’re a newcomer to this world of digital money.

Bitcoin (₿) is a cryptocurrency.

A cryptocurrency is decentralized electronic money with no central bank or solitary administrator. It may be transmitted user-to-user on the Bitcoin network with no need for intermediaries. Today we have also digital tokens. Make sure you know the differences between cryptocurrency and digital tokens before you start investing.

Bitcoin brings innovative technology. Transactions are confirmed by network nodes via cryptography and listed at a public distributed ledger referred to as a blockchain. Bitcoin was devised by an unknown individual or group of individuals using the title Satoshi Nakamoto and published as open-source applications in 2009.

Bitcoins are made as a benefit for a procedure called mining. They may be traded for other currencies, goods, and solutions.

Bitcoin and the Bitcoin technology has been criticized because of its use in prohibited trades, its high power consumption, cost volatility, thefts from trades, and also the chance that Bitcoin is an economic bubble. Bitcoin has been employed as an investment, but many regulatory agencies have issued investor alarms about Bitcoin.

When was Bitcoin made?

Satoshi implemented the Bitcoin applications as open-source code and published it on January 2009.

Back in January 2009, the Bitcoin system was made when Satoshi mined the very first block of the series, called the genesis block. Embedded at the coinbase of the block has been the following text: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” This notice was translated as either a timestamp and a remark on the instability brought on by fractional-reserve banking.

The recipient of the initial Bitcoin trade was cypherpunk Hal Finney, that made the very first reusable proof-of-work platform (RPOW) at 2004. Finney downloaded the bitcoin applications on its launch, also on 12 January 2009 obtained ten Bitcoins out of Nakamoto. Other ancient cypherpunk fans were founders of Bitcoin predecessors: Wei Dai, founder of b-money, and Nick Szabo, founder of Bit gold.

In 2010, the earliest known business trade using Bitcoin happened when developer Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin. Today, this might seem like an awful mistake, but remember that things change over time. Luckily, there are still some ways to earn free cryptocurrency, if that’s what you are after.

Satoshi is estimated to have mined a million bitcoins before evaporating in 2010 when he gave the system alert crucial and control of this code over Gavin Andresen. Andresen afterwards became the lead programmer at the Bitcoin Foundation. This abandoned chance for controversy to grow over the future growth course of Bitcoin.

First Bitcoin years

After ancient “proof-of-concept” trades, the first significant users of Bitcoin were black markets, for example, Silk Road.

In 2011, the price started at $0.30 each Bitcoin, rising to $5.27 for a year. Then is got higher to $31.50 on 8 June. Within a month that the cost fell to $11.00. The following month if dropped to $7.80, and in a second month to $4.77.

Litecoin, an early Bitcoin spin-off, also called an altcoin, emerged in October 2011. Many altcoins were created since then. Here’s a list of the top 100 cryptocurrencies.

In 2012 Bitcoin prices began at $5.27 rising to $13.30 for a year. By 9 January that the cost had climbed to $7.38, but crashed by 49% to $3.80 within the following 16 days. The cost then climbed to $16.41 on 17 August but dropped by 57% to $7.10 within the subsequent 3 days. After years of trading, we can identify some factors that influence the price of a cryptocurrency.

The Bitcoin Foundation was set in September 2012 to market Bitcoin’s growth and uptake.

Is Bitcoin going to the moon?

In 2013 prices began at $13.30 climbing to $770 by 1 January 2014.

In March 2013, the blockchain briefly split into two separate chains with various rules. The 2 blockchains operated concurrently for half an hour, each using its own variant of the trade history. The regular performance was revived while the vast majority of the network downgraded to version 0.7 of their Bitcoin software.

The Mt. Gox exchange temporarily halted Bitcoin deposits along with also the cost dropped by 23% to $37 before recovering to the preceding amount of about $48 from the subsequent hours.

Back in April, crypto exchanges BitInstant and Mt. Gox experienced processing delays because of inadequate capacity leading to the bitcoin cost falling from $266 to $76 before returning to $160 in six hours. The Bitcoin cost climbed to $259 on 10 April but crashed by 83% to $45 within the next 3 days.

About 15 May 2013, US police seized accounts connected with Mt. Gox after finding it had not enrolled as a money transmitter with FinCEN in America.

The FBI captured about 26,000 Bitcoins from October 2013 in the shadowy website Silk Road through the arrest of Ross William Ulbricht. Bitcoin’s cost rose to $755 on 19 November and dropped by 50% to $378 exactly the exact same moment. About 30 November 2013 the cost reached $1,163 before beginning a long-term accident, decreasing by 87% to $152 on January 2015.

Following the statement, the value of bitcoins dropped, and Baidu no more approved bitcoins for specific services. Purchasing real goods with any digital money was prohibited in China since at least 2009.

In 2014 prices began at $770 and dropped to $314 for the year. In February 2014 that the Mt. Gox market, the most significant bitcoin exchange at the moment, stated that 850,000 bitcoins were stolen from its clients, amounting to nearly $500 million.

In 2015 prices began at $314 and climbed to $434. In 2016 prices climbed to $998 about 1 January 2017.

2017 was when everyone found out about Bitcoin and the technology Bitcoin can bring

Prices started at $998 in 2017 and climbed to $13,412.44 about 1 January 2018. On 17 December bitcoin’s cost attained an all-time high $19,666.

China prohibited Bitcoin trading, together with the very first measures taken in September 2017, along with a comprehensive ban beginning 1 February 2018. The proportion of Bitcoin trading in Chinese yuan dropped from over 90% in September 2017 to less than 1% in June. Today, the regulations are more clear about cryptocurrency. Here’s a list on Cryptocurrency Regulation Around the World Report

During the remaining first half of 2018, Bitcoin’s price was between $11,480 and $5,848. On the 1st of July, 2018 Bitcoin’s cost was $6,469.

The diversity of the crypto world is a lot bigger than what is used to be. If you check CoinMarketCap, you will begin to understand what is happening and, even though Bitcoin still occupies the first position, it could not be like that for much longer. People are getting more interested in bitcoin technology and the rest of the coins. Ask yourself “What are the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum?“, and start to understand that there is much more to this technology than an investment.

Bitcoin’s cost was changed although additional cryptocurrencies were stolen in the Coinrail and Bancor, as investors concerned about the safety of cryptocurrency exchanges.

Today, many people want to learn more about the technology behind Bitcoin, how to start investing, and how to predict what will happen in the cryptocurrency world in the future. Today, we can even buy things or services using cryptocurrency. Crypto has come a long way since the early days. Nobody can tell for sure what will happen, but as a newbie make sure to avoid some beginners mistakes when getting into the crypto space. The economy or cryptocurrency is simple but your state of mind can easily be influenced by the media.

What is Ethereum? What is it used for? →

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