In the beginning, in a galaxy far far away...
An overview on how it all started
Bitcoin or BTC was created by some unknown guy who posted instructions on how , what , why to use BTC network.
BTC is pretty stright forward on how it works.. The network is made of miners computers that checks any & every transaction made to see if it is authentic, it does this by tracing back the transactions encrypted signature to see if it matches it's last transaction signature. And since miners have all the transactions on there computers for everyone to see, a digital ledger is formed & can be checked by everyone on the net. A ledger is just like a pile of receipts, you may not need it as a BTC investor or trader but the underlying technology of BTC is only worth what trust people put into it, and since all transactions are open for anyone to see, the trust in BTC is high. That part is called the blockchain
Every 2MB worth of transaction data is a called a block, miners get one BTC per block. total mineable BTC is 21 million, so at this stage you would be thinking why is the point of mining once all the BTC's are mined ?
Well miners also get a transaction fee per transaction they approve, it said one company is earning close to $1 mill a day just on transaction fees. Future to that, an owner of a bitcoin can pay a higher transaction fee to get the transfer done quicker then the 13 min it takes now, it was reported a owner of bitcoins paid $65,000 for a transaction fee just to get it done quicker then everyone else that was trying to buy into a ICO.
Can we trust the miners not to mess with the blockchain ? Well, if there was anything that looked shaky about the network, the ledger/blockchain, not only have you got miners that are big/small in mining power that are absolutely diehard believes in the tech & would raise alarms at the first sign of a red flag, but also because the BTC network is out in the open, millions of people a watching every step BTC takes for there own comfort & have programs set up making sure the miners are doing the right thing.
When BTC hit the net, it was just after the GFC of 2008, they marketed BTC as away to make transactions online anonymously while doing away Bank Fee's & away for the community to trade money without Government intervention.
And so BTC has grown to a $50 billion dollar market since 2010.
Ethereum
The founder of ETH or Ethereum had seen the BTC technology & thought is was lacking a few functions, i don't understand them all 100%, but the one that did make sense is the biggest difference which is the function to add "smart contracts". Ethereum from the start was created to make it easy for companies & entrepreneurs to use & create own projects based of the ETH network.
In simple, smart contracts allows users to put in a objective into a transaction ie: If mouse does not pay his rent on the due date, deduct x amount of coin from x account.
You may be thinking well first i'm not going to put my account details on the transaction so everyone can see, remember this is an anonymous transaction, the smart contract hides all account info & besides you're info on the transaction is just a number tied to you, not you're name.
ETH raised about $150 million 2016 , at the ICO was running for the raise, some hacker seen a door open the code of ETH & was able to help him self to $50 mill in coins from ICO investors. ETH decided rather then it's investors lose money, they would go to the last block mined before the incident happened , fix the code & start a new line the ledger will follow & the money will appear again like nothing had happened. That is called a hard fork.
About 20% of miners did not agree to doing this & objected saying we want all original & we don't want to fork, bad luck to those investors, if do the fork you will undermine ETH & the community. ETH didn't want to here of it & said if you want to the old line then call it something else & let us get on with business.. So the 20% majority said ok & called it ETC or Etherum classic.
The price of ETH did suffer but if you look at the price today, it's small bump to has been a massive ride.
For me, Etherum is the clear winner out all the coins, the team behind it are amazing, the support it get's is amazing , what's more is that Etherum is focussed on innovation & business but also making it's services easy to use where anyone can come along be part of Etherum in some way. I think of Etherum as the point of call for integrating Blockchain into the world or will be.
There is currently 740 different cryptocurrencies, most are a folk of ETH or BTC , meaning they use the platform but have there own coin , own community, own technology behind them. Some coins are 100% the same technology but just marketed in a different way to different people
Here you can check out info on all coins
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/all/
One thing that is sticking out from researching these coins is that they all want to become the next BTC or ETH, meaning they are trying to invent functions to have a point of difference from those two, create the fork from those two cos it's cheaper then creating you're own network codes from scratch, then try to target a sector that will possibly use such a technology
It's a not bad idea if you can come up with a solution or away to cut cost's for sector & then start getting companies to use you're tech, but i'm not seeing a lot of new innovation using blockchain. Think it needs more time to catch on i guess..
All the other coins i see doing ICO are crap projects but able to raise $300k to a few mill, when i say sheet i'm mean dog sheet.. you would spin out seeing them , most are scams anyway & you can tell cos they don't have the development team names on the white papers & websites for starters.
The community of miners will mine a project as long as you look after them by giving them the opportunity to pre-mine coins before the ICO starts, by allowing this, the miners are normally happy to mine the project as support. scratch my back & i will scratch yours.
