This is a review of the top 5 cryptocurrencies, with a bit of commentary on their histories and some observations about their future. If you are new to this field, it may be helpful to know a little about what’s out there.
Top five cryptocurrencies in 2018
What do you think of Bitcoin, then?
Well, it’s a currency. It has a price. And it’s used to buy stuff online. Maybe it could be used for more things in the future, but right now it just isn’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. That’s why I’m not giving you my top 5 cryptocurrencies of 2018.
The point is that cryptocurrencies are still early days, so they all have plenty of time to develop – and they’re all trying different things. Bitcoin started by trying to change how people spend money online, but these days it mainly tries to prevent people from spending money online by charging fees for transactions. Other currencies are doing things like helping to organize projects for clean energy, or making it easier for the public to participate in scientific research or politics.
This is a list of the top five cryptocurrencies, ranked by market cap. For this article I’ve taken the price of each coin as given and just listed them in order.
The ranking is: bitcoin, ethereum, ripple, bitcoin cash and litecoin.
I’ve given my reasons for placing them in that order, but if you disagree with any of them then feel free to add your own. If you think I’ve left anything out then please let me know.
I’ve written about Bitcoin before and I’m not going to repeat myself. But the obvious question is why. Bitcoin has a lot of problems. It’s slow and inefficient, it has unpredictable fluctuations in its price, it’s extremely volatile, it’s been hacked, and it’s attracted a lot of bad actors. And yet despite all that, it remains the most popular cryptocurrency.
The answer is that cryptocurrencies as currently designed aren’t very good at doing what they promise to do. Cash registers are terrible at recording transactions. But when you want to buy something from your local store, nothing else works quite as well. Payments are slow and costly, but so what? When someone wants to do business with you, he or she doesn’t care whether you have easy online payment options or not; all he cares about is “Do you have the product I’m looking for?” And while cryptocurrencies were designed to be secure currencies—unhackable by design—the best way to make something secure is not to make it uncrackable, but to make it uncrashable: to make sure that no one can steal the currency even if they manage to steal your computer or wallet.
So I’m going with Bitcoin because even though it has plenty of problems, and I don
The most common way to get money is to work for an employer who pays you a salary. That’s what we mean by ‘work’. But the most common way for people to make money is to do something that no one else is doing: starting an internet-based business. The big companies may be bigger and more powerful, but there are many other companies, sometimes called ‘cryptocurrencies’, that are much bigger than they are.
The latest hot trend is cryptocurrency, which is a kind of electronic money you can use to buy goods and services online, or exchange for other currencies. It all started with bitcoin, which in 2009 was the first modern cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin’s price crashed in 2015 and has been in decline ever since. But it still has a market cap of about $600 billion
Cryptocurrency is a kind of virtual money. When you make a profit, it goes into your bank account in dollars or euros or whatever the currency of your country is. But that’s not where it stays. It stays in the account of the currency’s creator.
Bitcoin is one of the most famous cryptocurrencies. It was created in 2009 by an anonymous person using the name “Satoshi Nakamoto.” That’s not his real name; he chose to remain anonymous, and there are many competing explanations for who he was. At first, bitcoin was used for purchases on an online black market called Silk Road. But recently bitcoin has become popular for other kinds of transactions as well.
The most common transaction consists of a bank transferring money from your account to someone else’s account, but at the same time sending data about what happened to some programmable computer somewhere else that can verify that transaction and then create new bitcoins for itself.
Bitcoin is the biggest cryptocurrency by far. Many people have bought into it, and it really is a great product. But it has some fundamental problems that make it hard to imagine how it could become the world’s currency.
The first problem with Bitcoin is that there aren’t that many people who use it. If everyone used Bitcoin, then no one would need anyone else’s money, and it would be undistributed wealth (unlike the kinds of wealth we want). So you could not create an economy based on Bitcoin.
The second problem with Bitcoin is that if everyone used Bitcoin, then very little if anything would change. The value of all bitcoins will go up as more and more are created; but this will happen only if people think bitcoins are worth something. Those who do not use bitcoins—the holders—will have no reason to change their minds. The total amount of wealth held by all bitcoin users will still be the same, no matter how many bitcoins are in circulation or whether they are used regularly or just hoarded (or even if they’re stolen; see below).