Among the much technological advancement over the last decades, cryptocurrencieshave soared higher than many others. It has heightened privacy features and decentralized nature, which helped catapult it to the forefront of the financial worlds. But there are many kinds of cryptocurrencies.
That’s what we’re going to find out in this article. If you are planning on investing in cryptocurrencies, you better read this article to know which one would be the best choice for you. Read on!
Bitcoin
Bitcoin can be treated as the OG of all cryptocurrencies. It’s where everything started. It is the culmination of the idea of a decentralized digital currency, which was built on a peer-to-peer network and operated on the revolutionary blockchain technology.
The value of bitcoin has been increasing astronomically especially in the past few months. Bitcoin is also among the most difficult cryptocurrencies to mine today because of its popularity as well as the fact that it’s the de-facto standard for cryptocurrencies.
It has also spawned numerous other alternative cryptocurrencies, which are collectively called altcoins. These altcoins are easier to mine and they seek to rectify the flaws found in bitcoin.
Ethereum
Just like the OG bitcoin, Ethereum runs on the blockchain technology. However, unlike bitcoin, it’s more than just a digital currency. Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform that operates “smart contracts.”
Smart contracts are computer codes that facilitate the exchange of money, content, property, shares, and any other thing that has value.
Ethereum enables developers to create any operations that they want and that can run exactly as programmed. There’s also almost zero possibility o censorship, interference, downtime, fraud, or third-party meddling.
Litecoin
Litecoin was created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee. It was launched in 2011 as an alternative to bitcoin, which by that time had already become extremely difficult to mine. Litecoin is also often referred to as the silver to bitcoin’s gold and it was among the first digital currencies to follow bitcoin.
It is based on a decentralized open source payment network and uses “scrypt” as a proof-of-work algorithm that can be decoded by consumer-grade CPU.
The Litecoin network generates 4x as many coins as its bitcoin counterpart. It also has a faster block generation rate that paves the way for faster transaction confirmations. Litecoin has a maximum supply of 84 million token. Around 53 million are currently in circulation.
Ripple
Most cryptocurrencies cater largely to individuals. Ripple is mainly towards banks, payment providers, and digital asset exchanges. However, there’s even more that sets Ripple apart from other cryptocurrencies.
The native Ripple cryptocurrency doesn’t really have an intrinsic value of its own. Rather, it serves as a token that protects the network called RippleNet against spam. Ripple is basically a real-time global payment network that offers quick, fail-safe, cross-border payments with maximum transparency and extremely low costs.
Ripple utilizes a consensus ledgeras the method of confirmation. This is a structure that doesn’t require mining for tokens. This means lower usage of computing power and minimum work latency. The downside is that Ripple tokens are created and distributed at will by Ripple themselves.
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