Our New Decentralized Planet - Chapter 1
Welcome! This document serves an a simple, broken down introduction to everything cryptocurrencies and blockchain. A vague starting point for those of you just getting into it. Don't feel like you are late to the party, we need you! Advocacy of and utilization for this technology is critical for mass adoption. You thought the internet was a big advancement but its nothing compared to this! Cryptocurrencies have been coined as "the internet of money" and the security behind them has the power to reinvent the world’s financial systems entirely, but we'll get into that more later. I will begin by providing a few helpful links and definitions of all this because I know how overwhelming it can be starting out. Chapter one is an overview of the common terms that will soon be mainstream as the adoption and education of the technology grows. Enjoy!
Cryptocurrency: A digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange using cryptography to secure the transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency
The first idea of cryptocurrency was created by Wei Dai in 1998 and published under the description of “b-money”, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system. In the same year, a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer by the name of Nick Szabo created “bit gold”. It was never implemented but has been known as the “direct precursor to the Bitcoin architecture”. Along with bit gold, Szabo introduced the phrase and concept of “smart contracts”-a computer protocol intended to facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract”. Szabos goal with smart contracts was to combine highly evolved practices of contract law with the design of electronic commerce protocols to link strangers on the internet.
Bitcoin was the first decentralized digital currency and currently is the most valuable and mainstream today. It was created in 2009 by a developer under the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. It uses the cryptographic hash function of SHA-256 for proof of work, or smart contracts. A good place to start: https://bitcoin.org/en/
---By January 2015, there were over 500 different types of cryptocurrencies, or altcoins, for trade in online markets. However, only 10 of them had market caps of over $10 million.
---By September 2017, there were 1,100 cryptocurrencies and the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies reached an all-time high surpassing $60 billion. Now big investors are paying attention!
Blockchain: “Technology where a group of distributed computing systems can compute the authenticity of a transaction in a decentralized manner”. Bitcoin is built on this. Not all use it, such as IOTA.
These videos pretty much cover the idea. (More info in Chapter 2!)
How Blockchain works:
Why Blockchain will change everything:
For a good overview of all of this, check out: