Digital currency has been extremely popular lately, but its convenience is not its main selling point. Money has always been the best medium that we’ve known since the days that bartering was so prominent. However, like most material things, money can be stolen. Even when money is entrusted to a bank, the threat of a hacking incident will always be as persistent as the fact that a clown’s face is ugly, not funny (sorry, clowns).
Now, the main flaw with banks is that they are governed by a centralized system. And when systems are highly centralized — like say, governments — there now is a single target that an attacker can focus all efforts toward. Governments can be destabilized, so how can banks fare any better? At least, that’s how cynics think, but general wisdom will always err on the side of safety and prevention.
And sure enough, in a fortunate stroke of luck and serendipity, one man, Satoshi Nakamori, would go on to fail at his attempt to create an online-based cash system. But he would unknowingly create something much more — Bitcoin.
Now, the premise of cryptocurrency is pretty much built on the same premise as that of P2P file sharing platforms — decentralization. And it’s exactly this attribute that made cryptocurrency so appealing. Now this begs the question:
In a system where there isn’t a single authority that’s tasked with governing and policing the system, how is order going to be maintained?
With everybody, of course. Every member of the network is called a node. A node is then tasked with verifying transactions that are assigned to it. This process is called cryptocurrency mining. Once transactions are verified, the record is then updated with this new information in the form of an unalterable and permanent block to the universal record, known as the blockchain.
It has been almost a decade since cryptocurrency has been introduced, and apart from Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies have been sprouting like mushrooms in a rainforest or like pimples on an angsty teen. Sites like The Coin Offering have since become a necessity in order to keep track of all these cryptos.
You could say that cryptocurrencies are pretty much like the stock market and FOREX and that would be an accurate assessment. However, cryptos are much more volatile compared to their other conventional counterparts. You could net a profit of about 10 times the amount of the currency you bought a week ago, but the losses could be just as exponential if not more.
If there’s another immutable fact that I’d like to point out, it’s that people will always flock to get-rich schemes. Take Bitconnect for example — it turned out to be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. And the hype about cryptocurrency is just the same as the hype we find in Adidas Yeezys or in the latest Star Wars Battlefront video game. Hype thrives on people’s emotions.
Hype is there because people choose to flock to it. But you, dear reader, you know better.