Welcome to our series on Decoding Crypto.

The Inception

Cryptocurrencies are a new form of money that was invented in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a mysterious figure who has never been identified. Nakamoto created an open-source system called Bitcoin which was used by thousands of people around the world before its value increased dramatically. Bitcoin is a popular alternative to fiat currency worldwide and has been accepted as a means of payment for goods and services. Since then, many other cryptocurrencies have been developed and launched on the market, including Ethereum and Litecoin.

Bitcoin is created and “mined” by solving complex algorithms.

Computers are used to create, or “mine”, bitcoins by solving complex algorithms. The process of mining involves solving an algorithm, that rewards miners with bitcoins for their efforts.

Mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin’s public ledger of past transactions (the blockchain – a digital ledger that records transactions). It’s distributed across multiple computers, so no single computer can control it. The blockchain is public, so anyone can see the transactions that have happened.

The blockchain is a permanent record of every transaction in the history of Bitcoin. As more people download it and make it available to other users, future changes to its content become impossible—because any alteration would be immediately obvious and require an enormous amount of computing power.

To ensure that only valid blocks are appended to the chain, miners must follow certain rules when processing transactions: they must include enough fees so that they will receive priority when competing with other miners; they must not produce invalid blocks by adding data outside the valid range, and finally they cannot use multiple computing devices at once!

Each transaction is recorded with a timestamp and is said to be irreversible.

A transaction is a transfer of value from one account to another. In cryptocurrency, the timestamp can be used to prove that the transaction was made at a certain time (or not).

Bitcoin($BTC) Paves the Way for Other Cryptocurrencies

You may have heard of other cryptocurrencies, like Litecoin and Ethereum. These are called altcoins because they’re not just copies of Bitcoin, but they’re also different from most other cryptocurrencies in some significant ways.

Bitcoin was created in 2009 by an anonymous person who called themselves Satoshi Nakamoto. It didn’t take long for people to realize that it was possible to send money around the world without having to use banks or go through any middlemen—just send someone some bitcoins! Nowadays, many people use Bitcoin as their main currency instead of dollars or euros.

In October 2011, an early Bitcoin spinoff or altcoin called Litecoin($LTC) was founded by Charlie Lee as a fork of the Bitcoin Core client. It’s based on the same open-source code as bitcoin but with a few technical differences. While it shares much of its history with bitcoin, there are some key differences between the two cryptocurrencies. Like Bitcoin, it is designed to be a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that operates on the blockchain without any central authorities or banks. Litecoin enables instant, almost zero-cost payments worldwide. Mathematics protects the integrity of a digital currency system and gives users control over their own finances.

Ethereum($ETH) follows a similar model: after creating Ethereum in 2015, Vitalik Buterin decided that there should be no limit on how many coins could be created out there; he wanted them all! So he set up an algorithm that would make sure nobody got too rich off their investments since no investor would ever receive more than 0.5 ETH per block (about $1 million worth today). This meant that anyone with enough money could buy into the system without worrying about being able to afford all those shiny new toys every time something came out.

Litecoin and Ethereum are only 2 of 13,000 and counting cryptocurrencies!

We hope you have a better understanding of cryptocurrency after reading through this article. We’ve only scratched the surface here, but hopefully, it will help set you on the right path.
Check out our series on Decoding Crypto HERE.

Hopium On!