CRYPTOCURRENCY

CryptoCurrency

Term That Shaken The World

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A digital asset that is designed to work as a medium of exchange, equipped with strong cryptography techniques to verify the transfer of units, secure financial transaction and control the creation of additional units.

You can say cryptocurrencies are rebels to our centralized banking systems, they use decentralized control. The decentralized control of each cryptocurrency works through distributed ledger technology or you can say blockchain that serves as a public financial transaction database.

Distributed Ledgers:- It is a consensus of replicated, shared and synchronized digital data spread all across the internet.

Bitcoin's most widely know cryptocurrency was first released as opensource software in 2009, it is generally as a first decentralized cryptocurrency. There are more than 6000  altcoins or you can say alternative variants of bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

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History

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Thought of an anonymous cryptographic electronic money came from David Chaum in 1983 called ecash. He implemented this idea in 1995 through digicash. It was an early form of cryptographic electronic payments which required user software to withdraw notes from a bank and designate specific encrypted keys before it can be sent to another recipient. This technique allowed the digital currency to be untraceable by government, issuing bank or any other third party.
National Security Agency(NSA) of United States published a paper entitled How To Make A Mint: the Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash in 1996, describing a Cryptocurrency system first publishing it in a MIT mailing and later in American Law Review in 1997.

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Birth Of Decentralized Cryptocurrency

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Bitcoin

Bitcoin was created in 2009 by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, it was the first decentralized cryptocurrency. It used SHA-256 (it is a cryptographic hash function designed by National Security Agency of United States), as its proof-of-work scheme.

Namecoin

Namecoin was created in April 2011, it is a cryptocurrency originally forked from bitcoin software. It is based on code of bitcoin and uses the same proof-of-work algorithm, it is limited to 21 million coins same as bitcoin, it was created in an attempt to form a decentralized DNS, which would make internet censorship very difficult.

Litecoin

Litecoin was created in October 2011, it is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. creation and transfer of coins are based on an open-source cryptographic protocol and it is not managed by any central authority. Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin. It was the first successful cryptocurrency to use script (a password-based key derivation function created by Colin Percival, originally for the Tarsnap backup service. The algorithm was specifically designed to make it costly to perform large-scale custom hardware attacks by requiring large amount of memory), as its hash function instead of SHA-256.

Peercoin

Peercoin, also known as PPCoin or PPC, is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency using both proof-of-stake and proof-of-work system. It was the first to use proof-of-work / proof-of-stake hybrid. It is based on a paper that listed the authors as Scott Nadal and Sunny King. The peercoin source code is distributed under the MIT/X11 software license.

Ethereum

Ethereum was released on 30th July 2015, its original authors are Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood. It is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform.