Название: Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies
Автор: Peter Kent
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Личные финансы
isbn: 9781119855828
isbn:
http://coinmarketcap.com
, www.cryptocompare.com/
, https://coincodex.com/
, and www.coingecko.com/
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With a knowledge of what role a coin’s market cap plays in the industry, you can start to evaluate cryptocurrencies based on that metric.
MINEABLE VERSUS NONMINEABLE CRYPTOCURRENCIES
Where does cryptocurrency come from? Cryptocurrency can be mined — the least common form, actually — or it can be pre-mined.
To say that a cryptocurrency has been pre-mined, or is nonmineable, simply means that the cryptocurrency already exists. The blockchain is a ledger containing information about transactions. When the blockchain was first created, the ledger already contained a record of all the cryptocurrency that the founders planned for. No more will be added; it’s all there in the blockchain already.
Bitcoin
Ranking number one on the list, Bitcoin was developed in 2008. As of September 2021, Bitcoin’s market cap is around $951 billion.
A bit of Bitcoin background
But Satoshi’s anonymity isn’t really a big deal, because Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies, for that matter) is supposed to be open source and decentralized, as we explain in Chapter 2 of this minibook. In fact, according to Bitcoin.org, no single person or entity “owns the Bitcoin network much like no one owns the technology behind email.” Bitcoin users around the world control Bitcoin, with the developer improving the software and the forkers making some radical changes. However, the main idea behind Bitcoin and Bitcoin’s protocol can’t be changed.
In mid-April 2011, Bitcoin’s market cap was about $6 million. In April 2021, the market cap was over a trillion dollars. If you had bought 1 Bitcoin for $2 in November 2011 (something Kiana’s investor friends told her to do that she ignored), your single Bitcoin would have been worth $64,000 in April 2021. Of course, many initial investors bought more than one Bitcoin at the time, which is exactly how all those Bitcoin millionaires were made. If you had bought 100 Bitcoins in November 2011 for a paltry sum of $200, by April 2021 they would have been worth $12.8 billion!
But by the time everyone started talking about Bitcoin, it went crashing down to around $120 billion and stayed there for most of 2018. It maintained its number one ranking among all other cryptocurrencies, though. The main reason behind this position may have been that most people had heard a lot (relatively speaking) about Bitcoin but not so much about other cryptocurrencies. So even though they had several hundred other altcoins to choose from, even some that may have been better long-term alternatives to Bitcoin, most newbies who wanted to get involved in the market started out with Bitcoin.
Another reason for Bitcoin’s huge market cap is its accessibility. It’s pretty safe to say that all cryptocurrency exchanges (see Book 5, Chapter 3) carry Bitcoin. But not all exchanges list all altcoins, at least for now.
Bitcoin characteristics
Here are some main features of Bitcoin:
Bitcoin’s trading symbol is BTC.
Bitcoin is mineable.
Coin creation occurs through proof of work (PoW; see Chapter 2 of this minibook).
Transaction time is between 10 minutes and 24 hours.
Transactions aren’t fully anonymous.
Bitcoin is decentralized.
Mining Bitcoin requires a lot of (wasted) energy.
Ethereum
Ranked number two based on coin market cap as of 2021, Ethereum is another major cryptocurrency. As of September 2021, its market cap is around $465 billion.
Brief Ethereum background
Compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum is a pretty young currency; Russian-American Vitalik Buterin proposed it in 2013. It’s almost five years younger than Bitcoin, which in the cryptoworld is still a big deal.
Ethereum uses the old Bitcoin’s wisdom and philosophy, but it has a different purpose and capability. According to its website, СКАЧАТЬ