Top 6 Cryptocurrencies Worldwide

Top Cryptocurrencies Worldwide

Cryptocurrency: With more and more talk and discussion going on around them and their vitality, many people are getting interested in it and want to know more about it. There might be people who may have any needs that could be fulfilled by them or general investors who want to reap the rewards out of it, but having a good knowledge of cryptocurrencies is essential before one gets involved in them. This is true especially for common people as there are many scams on the basis of cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings.

We will begin discussing the first and the most popular cryptocurrency that came into existence — Bitcoin. From there, we will explore some of the other cryptocurrencies that are popular.

1. The first cryptocurrency: Bitcoin

Bitcoin has been created from ideas set forth by the white paper written in 2008 by its mysterious developer Satoshi Nakamoto. We don’t yet know who Satoshi Nakamoto is or even if that person is a single individual or a group of people. 

Bitcoin basically works like this: all the coins are digital and have no tangible existence. These digital coins balances are kept using two keys known as public and private keys. Public key kind of serves like an address identifying you to the world for others to send bitcoins and private keys are the means of authorizing them. All the transactions of bitcoin are encrypted and recorded over a decentralized public ledger of the blockchain. 

However, while everyone can view the transaction amounts, only the owners of them would be able to decrypt them as only they would have the private keys which are required in their decryption. All the transactions of bitcoin are decentralized, i.e, they do not have any central banks or authorities operating which would also help in reducing the costs of transactions.

How To Obtain Bitcoin

One may obtain coins through performing transactions with the individuals who already own the coins through crypto exchanges and to mine it to generate new bitcoin. Mining is the process of solving complex computational problems upon which the miner would be awarded bitcoin.  However, the mining could not continue after the number of coins mined reaches the maximum value of 21 million. Roughly only 3 million of those coins are mined.

As more and more coins are mined, the complexity of the problems will be increased thus decreasing the rate at which new bitcoins are created.

The first Bitcoin block, block 0 was mined in 2009 and throughout these years, the value of the bitcoin had been volatile. As for now, Bitcoin’s market cap now is $114 billion and its per token value is $6,262.

"Save gold-God’s money or Bitcoin-people’s money."
Bitcoin: The People’s Money

There are other cryptocurrencies too which are modelled after bitcoin which are collectively called altcoins like the alternate coins. These alternate coins came into existence by often presenting themselves as some modification to the existing bitcoin or an improved version in some sort of the bitcoin. But there are also some coins that are fake coins. 

Some of the altcoins are easier to mine than bitcoin, but they come with their own tradeoffs for that including higher risk while buying on lower levels of liquidity, acceptance and also value retention of the coin.

Let us go on about some of the most popular altcoins. We only discuss some of the cryptocurrencies as a comprehensive list of all altcoins is very difficult and lengthy as there are more than 2000 cryptocurrencies as of this year and many of them actually have popularity among a dedicated community consisting of backers and investors.

2. Ethereum (ETH):

Ethereum can be said to be one of the most popular and most heard of altcoins. It was launched in 2015 and is a decentralized software platform that lets decentralized applications and smart contracts to be run without any undesirable issues like downtime, fraud, interference from the third party. Applications on ethereum will be running on the ether — which is its platform-specific cryptographic token. In simple terms, ether can be understood of the vehicle for moving around in the ethereum platform. This ether is mostly sought by the developers who want to develop and run applications inside the ethereum but Investors are now looking for purchasing other digital currencies through ether.

A presale for ether was launched by ethereum during 2014 in which it had gained a great response. This helped to bring in the age of ICO (Initial Coin Offering). The coin was launched in 2015 and when the attack on DAO happened in 2016 which transferred 3.6 million Ether using some vulnerabilities found within the systems, Ethereum was decided to be split into Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic(ETC).

As of now the market cap of Ethereum is $14 billion with a per token value of $131.

3. Tether (USDT)

Being one of the first in the group of stable coins, Tether is most popular among them and was launched in 2014. Stable coins, indicated by their name, try to bring a sense of stability in their market value by relating their value to any external reference point generally being another currency. This is important because most digital currencies even bitcoin too have seen a high scale of volatility frequently. Stable coins like tether promise have a smooth curve of price fluctuations which attract cautious users.

Tether would describe itself as a blockchain-enabled platform which is designed to facilitate the use of fiat currencies in a digital way. That is to say, Tether will allow people to utilize blockchain and related technologies for transactions in traditional currencies all while minimizing the drawbacks of volatility and complexity of digital currencies.

The current market cap of tether is $6 billion and the per token value is $1.

4. Bitcoin Cash(BCH):

Bitcoin Cash is one of the most successful and also the earliest among the hard forks of the original bitcoin which is why it is very important in the history of cryptocurrencies. But what is a hard fork anyway? Fork of a coin can be said to be a split of the original currency into more ones. This happens when there are debates and arguments between developers and miners about certain features of the coin. 

Due to the very nature of decentralization of the cryptocurrencies, any wholesale changes to the code must be made agreeable to all. Although the mechanism of this process varies across many currencies, this is generally true. When different parties cannot come to an agreement about a certain feature, this results in the currency being split into the original and other copy where the original one will remain true to its original code and features while the other copy will be a new version of the original coin. 

BCH happened when an issue was raised about the size of the block. One faction argued that in order to make the transactions faster, they needed to increase the size of the blocks and others disagreed with it, resulting in the split. Later, in Bitcoin Cash, the size of the blocks is increased to 8 MB from 1 MB in the original bitcoin. The other changes made to the original bitcoin include the removal of segregated witness protocol.

The current market cap of BCH is $3 billion and the value of each token is $217.

5. LIBRA:

LIBRA is a cryptocurrency that is to be launched by Facebook. There had long been rumours and speculations that Facebook is working on its own digital tokens before its formal announcement and release of the white paper for libra in June of last year. Facebook gave a tentative launch date for Libra to be in 2020 for which it explained that they are committed to sorting through the regulatory barriers before launching this currency.

With facebook’s global reach and the potential for massive volumes of exchange, there are justifiably high expectations on the platform. Facebook announced that Libra will be operated in part by Calibra, which is a Facebook subsidiary. 

6. Ripple (XRP):

Launched in 2012, Ripple is a real-time global settlement network which offers very fast, certain and cheap international payments. Ripple’s method of confirmation, i.e, the consensus ledger is unique from other cryptocurrencies because they don’t require mining. What is done here is that all of the tokes are pre-mined before launch so that there is no creation of XRP over time, only the introduction or removal of the token from the supply in the market according to the guidelines from the network. This reduces the computational overhead and thus minimized network latency providing fast transactions.

Ripple has seen considerable success with its business model and it remains one of most preferred digital currencies within the traditional financial institution who are looking for ways of revolutionizing cross border payments.

Its current market cap is $7 billion and per token value is $0.17.

They are only a tip of the iceberg and there are many other cryptocurrencies which are already in circulation or to be started. Ultimately, the correct one for you will be based on your needs and how the coin satisfies them without significant tradeoffs.

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