What Is Cryptocurrency?
Cryptocurrency is an electronic money created with technology controlling its creation and protecting transactions, while hiding the identities of its users.
Crypto is short for “cryptography”, and cryptography is computer technology used for security, hiding information, identities and more. Currency simply means “money currently in use”. Cryptocurrencies are a digital cash designed to be quicker, cheaper and more reliable than our regular government issued money.
Instead of trusting a government to create your money and banks to store, send and receive it, users transact directly with each other and store their money themselves. Because people can send money directly without a middleman, transactions are usually very affordable and fast.
To prevent fraud and manipulation, every user of a cryptocurrency can simultaneously record and verify their own transactions and the transactions of everyone else. The digital transaction recordings are known as a “ledger” and this ledger is publicly available to anyone. With this public ledger, transactions become efficient, permanent, secure and transparent.
With public records, cryptocurrencies don’t require you trust a bank to hold your money. They don’t require you trust the person you are doing business with to actually pay you. Instead, you can actually see the money being sent, received, verified, and recorded by thousands of people. This system requires no trust. This unique positive quality is known as “trustless”.
The first decentralized cryptocurrency was bitcoin.
What Is BlockChain?
Blockchain is technology for creating permanent, secure digital recordings that don’t rely on any single person or group. Blockchains can record any information, though the first example was created to record bitcoin transactions.
Imagine the blockchain as a book of records. Each page in that book is a block and can record anything. Blocks are created one after the other, chained to each other creating what we know as the blockchain.
Multiple blockchain records are maintained simultaneously by many of unrelated individuals and their computers, making it cloud storage on steroids. Updates are seen immediately and manipulation is extremely difficult/impossible. This positive quality known of many people keeping their own copies of the blockchain is known as “distributed”.
There are hundreds of blockchains created by many of the groups to records all sorts of information including art, medical records, computer information and much more.
Read More: Intro Part2 for MORE infos!