For those of you who like to observe technological developments, maybe you have been accustomed to hear the term Bitcoin. Well, Bitcoin is the most famous virtual currency (cryptocurrency) in the world today.
Cryptocurrency itself is a term for virtual currency that uses encryption to verify every unit of money delivery among users, as well as regulate the release of new currency units. This virtual currency operates independently without the intervention of a central bank.
Besides Bitcoin, there is actually a lot of cryptocurrency circulating around the world. In November 2017, there were more than 1,300 cryptocurrencies recorded.
This time, we try to summarize some of them, which is also the virtual currency with the largest total value (market cap) at this time.
BITCOIN
Bitcoin (BTC) is the first cryptocurrency to emerge in the world. Cryptocurrency is the fruit of thinking of a (or a collection) developers who named themselves as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 ago.
Bitcoin using algorithms has been designed to produce 21 million Bitcoin by 2124 (forecast). There is also total Bitcoin in the world today has reached 16.7 million BTC.
Market capitalization: US $ 121 billion (approximately Rp1,7 quadrillion).
ETHEREUM
Ethereum (ETH) is a virtual currency created in 2014 by a twenty-year-old boy, Vitalik Buterin. The main thing that distinguishes Ethereum from Bitcoin is the application of the Smart Contract, which allows you to program transactions, before you do it.
Market capitalization: US $ 41.9 billion (approximately Rp598 trillion)
RIPPLE
Ripple Network originally developed Ripple or people often call it XRP in private to make secure, easy, and fast payment systems. However, in 2013, Ripple Network decided to make the project open source under the ISC license. Ripple uses the Consensus algorithm that allows distributed payment, exchange, and remittance processing.
Market capitalization: US $ 19.9 billion (approximately Rp284 trillion)
BITCOIN CASH
In 2017 yesterday, there was talk about the scalability of Bitcoin. The virtual currency is considered not able to accommodate transactions in large quantities, because the maximum size of each block is only one megabyte.
This also led to the Bitcoin hard fork that occurred on August 1, 2017. The activity also gave rise to a new cryptocurrency named Bitcoin Cash (BCH), with a block size of a maximum of 8 megabytes.
Anyone who has Bitcoin right before hard fork happens will get Bitcoin Cash in the same amount. However, both virtual currencies will have a different book of transaction (ledger) after hard fork.
Market capitalization: US $ 11.5 billion (around Rp164 trillion)
LITECOIN
Litecoin or LTC was officially present to the public in 2011. Former employee of Google Charles Lee made this Cryptocurrency, with the aim of presenting "Bitcoin" better.
The advantages offered by LTC is the duration to produce blocks that only takes 2.5 minutes, faster than BTC which takes up to ten minutes. This can happen because LTC uses a simpler Scrypt algorithm and quickly enjoys the SHA-256 algorithm on BTC.
Market capitalization: US $ 6.7 billion (around Rp95 trillion)
EOS
EOS is software that allows you to create a blockchain network architecture for a particular purpose. The software can make adjustments to multiple CPUs so that the blockchain system can work up to millions of transactions per second. This software itself is made by block.one, a company from Cayman Islands.
Market capitalization: US $ 4.6 billion (approximately Rp65.7 trillion)
Those are some examples of digital currency that you must know to surf in the world of cryptocurrency, if you consider this article useful please help upvote, comment & reblog. see you in the next article.