EXPLORE CURRENCIES

When Bitcoin was created in 2009 it was the only cryptocurrency. This contrasts with the over 1000 different cryptocurrencies that exist today. Below, you can explore some of the largest cryptocurrency projects and their purposes. For a full list of cryptocurrencies, click here.

Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is the pioneer cryptocurrency. It was released in 2009 by an anonymous person/s under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. It aims to remove the financial institutions that act as middlemen, such as banks and companies like Visa and Mastercard, by allowing buyers and sellers to connect directly. The primary criticism of Bitcoin is that it is very slow to process transactions and has not scaled well with the significant increase in users. Bitcoin can handle roughly three to four transactions per second. Compare this with Visa, which has said its’ network can process 56,000 transactions per second; it is clear to see Bitcoin has a long way to go before it can replace traditional payment methods.

Bitcoin has responded to these scaling problems by introducing SegWit and the lightning network. An explanation of these topic is outside the scope of this website, you can learn about SegWit and the Lightning network here and here, respectively.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash was a hard of the Bitcoin blockchain and aims to solve the problem of scalability by increasing the block size to 8MB. This increase over the 1MB block size of Bitcoin allows for more transactions to be handled per second. It is still a decentralised payment system based on blockchain technology and shares almost all of the advantages and disadvantages of Bitcoin; the significant difference being it can handle more transactions. All users who owned Bitcoin on August 1st, 2017 would have received the same amount of Bitcoin Cash as they had Bitcoin at the time.

Warning

While Bitcoin Cash sounds like an improvement to Bitcoin, there is a large amount of evidence that suggests Bitcoin Cash may be an attempt to mislead the cryptocurrency community.

Firstly, most of the mining is centralised with a group of miners in China (remember, the more decentralised a cryptocurrency is, the less likely it is to be manipulated). Furthermore, the owner of Bitmain, the largest supplier of Bitcoin mining hardware, Jihan Wu, has made his website only accept payment in Bitcoin Cash. Due to the enormous demand for Bitcoin mining hardware, many people having to buy Bitcoin Cash before they can purchase mining hardware would artificially inflate the price. While Bitmain’s decision to only accept payment in Bitcoin Cash may not seem suspicious, the owner of Bitmain is also one of a handful of people that run Bitcoin Cash and hence, has a serious conflict of interests. Many people see this as price manipulation by the team leading Bitcoin Cash. Lastly, Bitmain miners use an exploit in Bitcoin that allows them to mine more efficiently. It is theorised that when the Bitcoin core developers decided to implement SegWit (which would have nullified this exploit), Jihan Wu decided to fork Bitcoin and create Bitcoin Cash which would allow these miners to continue using this exploit in order to mine more efficiently.

We must add that some of this evidence is circumstantial, however, a significant portion of the cryptocurrency community is suspicious of Bitcoin Cash. We highly recommend doing thorough research before purchasing Bitcoin Cash.

Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum has a team of developers, led by the founder Vitalik Buterin, which are responsible for managing it. The flagship feature of Ethereum is smart contracts. Smart contracts allow for actions to be automatically completed once certain, pre-programmed conditions are met. Because these contracts run on the blockchain, they cannot be interfered with. The token of the Ethereum network is Ether.

Ethereum Classic (ETC)

Ethereum Classic resulted from the forking of the Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum Classic and Ethereum blockchains are identical up until block 1,920,000 but the two are different currencies. While the full story surrounding this hard fork is very complicated, in essence, it happened to refund money that was stolen. This fork is regarded as one of the most influential occurrences in cryptocurrency history due to the dilemma it posed, let the thief get away with an enormous amount of people’s money or overrule the entire purpose of blockchains which is to ensure no one can tamper with it? The fork occurred due to different parties each supporting one side of the argument. For the full and fascinating story behind this fork, click here.

Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee while he was an employee at Google in October 2011. Instead of having supply limited at 21 million coins, Litecoin’s supply is capped at 84 million coins. Litecoin is widely regarded as one of the fastest currencies due to decreased block generation time and increased block size.

Ripple (XRP)

Ripple is a global payment network that connects banks all over the world which allows for real-time, cross-border transactions with very low fees. Currently, many intermediaries are involved in cross-border transactions, making the process time intensive and costly. Ripple eliminates the need for these intermediaries by directly connecting banks which enables time and cost savings.

Dash (DASH)

Dash is a cryptocurrency based on Bitcoin with additional features such as instant and private transactions. It aims to be the most user-friendly and scalable cryptocurrency in the world and is self-governed and self-funded. Dash funds its growth by setting aside 10% of all generated coins that are allocated to specific projects to improve the network. Anyone can propose projects that are then voted for and funded if the vote is successful.