A cryptocurrency The Digital Coin (or cryptocurrency) is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets. Cryptocurrencies are classified as a subset of digital currencies and are also classified as a subset of alternative currencies and virtual currencies.
List of cryptocurrencies
There is more than 1,700 cryptocurrencies with more than 710 cryptocurrencies available for trade-in online markets as of July 2016 and more than 740 in total for now.but only a few dozens have reached a market cap of above $10 million
Top 3 cryptocurrencies for 2018
Bitcoin, created in 2009, was the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Since then, numerous other cryptocurrencies have been created. These are frequently called altcoins, as a blend of alternative coin. Bitcoin and its derivatives use decentralized control as opposed to centralized electronic money and central banking systems. The decentralized control is related to the use of bitcoin’s blockchain transaction database in the role of a distributed ledger
Litecoin: Litecoin is probably the second most important digital coin. It was created in 2011 as a lightweight alternative to Bitcoin; the two key differences between them are: – Litecoin’s smaller time intervals between adding new blocks to its Blockchain, which is supposed to decrease transaction times; – Litecoin’s mining is governed by the Scrypt algorithm opposed to Bitcoin’s SHA 256.
Ethereum: is a decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference. is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality. It provides a decentralized Turing-complete virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using an international network of public nodes. Ethereum also provides a cryptocurrency token called “ether”, which can be transferred between accounts and used to compensate participant nodes for computations performed. “Gas”, an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network.
Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer.
