What is Cryptocurrency?

Forgot banks, forget the middle man, the future is Cryptocurrency and it’s purely internet based. Nobody owns or controls it, this is pure power to the people currency. I knew about it back in 2009, but unfortunately didn’t take it seriously back, but I’d argue I’m still not late to the party. The true potential of Cryptocurrency hasn’t even been realised yet, with many people in the public eye still in denial or hell bent on its destruction. 

Satoshi Nakamoto is allegedly the brain child behind Cryptocurrency, but nobody has ever met him, so the rumour is this might be a code name for a small to medium group of developers. One thing is for certain though, this band of coders have single handily helped change the future and history of money forever. 

The currency is decentralised, this means that banks are left out in the cold, in fact there’s no need for banks in the new world of crypto, and that’s why the likes of Goldman Sachs and other longstanding banking establishments are secretly bricking it. This innovation in Cryptocurrency has recently dented the future of banks even further, with the arrival of Blockchain, a sales ledger if you like, that rubber stamps every transaction within the world of Cryptocurrency. 

How Blockchain works is actually easy to understand, each and everyone’s transaction are verified by big beefy computers with the latest and greatest GPUs, from all over the world. They perform massively complex computational tasks to prove that the transaction is valid, as part of a massive chain of computers, making it next to impossible to hack any of the computers present within the Blockchain, the people who own these computers are known as miners. They help to keep Cryptocurrency safe and prove that each transaction is valid, but nobody ever knows when that transaction will be checked. 

The miners sell their computational power to help perform these transactions, and get paid a tidy sum in rewards depending on the power they throw at these complex calculations. Some websites such as NiceHash pay their miners in Bitcoin, but the true rewards for miners are when they club together outside of websites the likes of NiceHash. 

To get started you’ll need a wallet, but do your research as there’s a big difference between software and hardware wallets, I highly recommend the Nano S Ledger, this clever bit of hardware allows you to store your Cryptocurrency offline. For buying Cryptocurrency, I personally recommend Coinbase and GDax, the latter is owned by Coinbase, but these are trusted and easy places to buy Cryptocurrency, unless you fancy jumping on  mining bandwagon. 

There’s risks in everything, if you’re not sensible you can easily lose your hard earned crypto, so like everything in life, if you go into something half hearted, this probably isn’t for you at this stage and infancy of Cryptocurrency. Don’t believe anything anyone tells you, do your research, but one thing is for sure, Cryptocurrency is here to stay, if the people want it.