What is cryptocurrency...?

in cryptocurrency •  7 years ago 

I am going to show you a brief description of cryptocurrency that what it is and how it counts in today's life. Very few people in the world know about it and it values. There are many people who have already reached millionaire status by dealing in cryptocurrency. Clearly there's a lot of money in this brand new industry.

Basically, cryptocurrency is electronic currency, short and simple. However, what's not so short and simple is exactly how it comes to have value. Cryptocurrency is a digitized, virtual, decentralized currency produced by the application of cryptography, which, according to Merriam Webster dictionary, is the "computerized encoding and decoding of information". Cryptography is the foundation that makes debit cards, computer banking and eCommerce systems possible.

Cryptocurrency isn't backed by banks; it's not backed by a government, but by an extremely complicated arrangement of algorithms. It is in direct opposition to what is called fiat money. Fiat money is currency that gets its worth from government ruling or law. The dollar, the yen, and the Euro are all examples. Any currency that is defined as legal tender is fiat money.
Cryptocurrency comes in quite a few forms. Bitcoin was the first and is the standard from which all other cryptocurrencies pattern themselves. All are produced by meticulous alpha-numerical computations from a complex coding tool. Some other cryptocurrencies are Litecoin, Namecoin, Peercoin, Steem, Dogecoin, and Worldcoin, to name a few. These are called altcoins as a generalized name. The prices of each are regulated by the supply of the specific cryptocurrency and the demand that the market has for that currency.

The way cryptocurrency is brought into existence is quite fascinating. Unlike gold, which has to be mined from the ground, cryptocurrency is merely an entry in a virtual ledger which is stored in various computers around the world. These entries have to be 'mined' using mathematical algorithms. Individual users or, more likely, a group of users run computational analysis to find particular series of data, called blocks. The 'miners' find data that produces an exact pattern to the cryptographic algorithm. At that point, it's applied to the series, and they've found a block. After an equivalent data series on the block matches up with the algorithm, the block of data has been unencrypted. The miner gets a reward of a specific amount of cryptocurrency. As time goes on, the amount of the reward decreases as the cryptocurrency becomes scarcer. Adding to that, the complexity of the algorithms in the search for new blocks is also increased. Computationally, it becomes harder to find a matching series. Both of these scenarios come together to decrease the speed in which cryptocurrency is created. This imitates the difficulty and scarcity of mining a commodity like gold.

Now, anyone can be a miner. The originators of Bitcoin made the mining tool open source, so it's free to anyone. However, the computers they use run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The algorithms are extremely complex and the CPU is running full tilt. Many users have specialized computers made specifically for mining cryptocurrency. Both the user and the specialized computer are called miners.

Thank you for giving time to my article.
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