What types of digital currency are there?
As the blockchain becomes more and more known to the public, more and more people pay attention to digital currency. So what types of digital currency are there? How are they born? Let us take a brief look at the top three digital currencies currently ranked by market capitalization.
Before discussing "what types of digital currency are there", I believe many people have heard of Bitcoin more than once. This year, Bitcoin has been frequently searched for. In fact, Bitcoin is not a new thing, it has a history of more than ten years. On November 1, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", describing how to create a decentralized electronic transaction system. On January 3, 2009, he developed the first client program that realized the Bitcoin algorithm and carried out the first "mining", and dug up the first batch of 50 Bitcoins, and Bitcoin was officially born since then.
So apart from the well-known Bitcoin, what are the digital currencies? In fact, after the advent of Bitcoin, other digital currencies began to appear one after another, and the community referred to these latecomers as altcoins. Although the name is shorter than Bitcoin, these digital coins also have their own world. Let’s first talk about Ethereum, the digital currency whose market value is second only to Bitcoin. It is an open-source public blockchain platform that provides a decentralized Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to process peer-to-peer contracts through its dedicated cryptocurrency ETH. At the end of 2013, inspired by Bitcoin, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, released the first white paper of Ethereum and started the project. From July 24, 2014, Ethereum conducted a 42-day ETH pre-sale. At the beginning of 2016, the technology of Ethereum was recognized by the market, and the price began to skyrocket, attracting a large number of people other than developers to enter the world of Ethereum.
The digital currency to be mentioned below, although its market value ranks second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum, is obviously less confident in terms of its relationship with its own blockchain network ecology. This digital currency is Ripple (XRP). Someone made such an explanation: most digital currencies are inseparable from their own ecology. For example, BTC is an important part of the Bitcoin network, ETH is an indispensable part of the Ethereum ecosystem, but buying XRP is equivalent to buying Tencent’s Q coin. In 2004, an early version of Ripple was launched, but this version was not very successful, mainly because this version can only transfer money through Ripple between people who trust each other, and it cannot be expanded without a chain of trust. Beginning in 2012, OpenCoin began to take over the Ripple project, and launched a new version in 2013. The new version added two new measures, the first is the introduction of gateways, and the second is the launch of Ripple. Ripple coins can be circulated in the entire Ripple network, the total amount is 100 billion, and it will gradually decrease with the increase of transactions. Ripple is an Internet transaction protocol that allows people to pay in any currency.
In addition to these three, what types of digital currency are there? According to CoinMarketCap data, the top ten digital currencies are BTC, ETH, XRP, USDT, BCH, LTC, EOS, BNB, BSV and XLM. At present, the number of digital currencies included in the website has reached 4924, and the number is still increasing. However, it is common sense in the industry that digital currencies are seriously mixed. What are the digital currencies that can really survive in the end? let us wait and see.
