What Is Cryptocurrency

Progress is a natural part of human beings and their life. None of us can imagine life without internet in this day and age since it facilitates so many aspects of our life.

Progress is a natural part of human beings and their life. None of us can imagine life without internet in this day and age since it facilitates so many aspects of our life. However, those of us who are aware of how the internet operates and how some websites could manipulate data, are in constant fear. The issue of trust is a lasting issue in the web until now, especially when it comes to money transactions. A few years back, someone with the alias of “Satoshi Nakamoto” introduced a technology called Blockchain, which is literally information formed into blocks of data and it is completely decentralized, meaning no exact point of origin. When someone opts in to have a copy of the chain hence joining in the network, the distributed copies will each update, and this makes it hard to manipulate and hack. So the big question is, is it secure ?

“New blocks are always stored linearly and chronologically. That is, they are always added to the “end” of the blockchain. If you take a look at Bitcoin’s blockchain, you’ll see that each block has a position on the chain, called a “height.” As of Feb. 2019, the block’s height had topped 562,000. After a block has been added to the end of the blockchain, it is very difficult to go back and alter the contents of the block. That’s because each block contains its own hash, along with the hash of the block before it. Hash codes are created by a math function that turns digital information into a string of numbers and letters. If that information is edited in any way, the hash code changes as well. ” (Fortney)

With the emergence of block-chain, crypto currency soon followed, and the most popular was bitcoin. With bitcoin you could trade in your money for digital cash, you only needed the account, and it afforded you complete anonymity in your transactions, with no one to monitor how your money is spent. This reflected badly most of the time, because people started using it for illegal services in the dark web, such as ordering drugs, assassinations, etc. Even though the issue of trust was eliminated on the web, there is still no guarantee what happens to the money offered. The idea of virtual money existed since the very beginnings of computers. The emergence of credit cards was revolutionary and in the matter of only months millions of people were using it. The new age favors the fact that we do not need to carry cash with us all the time, and cryptocurrency carried this idea even further since it is fully digital. But bitcoin also came with a problem. If someone lost the credentials to their accounts, there was no way of retrieving them. Billions of dollars were lost because of this fact.

Sources

Fortney, Luke. "Blockchain Explained". Investopedia, 2019, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp. Accessed 8 Jan 2020. Explained, Netflix. Cryptocurrency. Netflix, 2018.