An In-depth Overview of Cryptocurrency: WHY AND WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BITCOIN, #2

By C. MYDEN

The Second Ebook in the Series of "Why and What You Need to Know About Cryptocurrency"

An more In-depth overview of Cryptocurrency and it's orgin, and the technology behind it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. MYDEN
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393106227

Book preview

Table of Contents

1  Introduction -  - - - - - - - - -  4

1.1 Overview of cryptocurrency - - - - - -  5

1.2 The Revival of cryptocurrency - - - - - -  6

1.3 The Bit gold - - - - - - - - 6

1.4 What is cryptocurrency - - - - - - -  8

1.5 How Did Cryptocurrencies Develop - - - - -  10

1.6 Why are Cryptocurrencies becoming so popular - - -  -  11

1.7 Cryptocurrencies, Fiat Currencies, and Stocks - - -  -  12

1.8 What is cryptocurrency mining - - - - - -  12

1.9 How Do Miners Make Profits - - - - - -  12

1.1.0 Legality of cryptocurrencies - - - - - -  13

1.1.0 What are the properties of cryptocurrency - - -  -  13

2  Blockchain Basics - - - - - - - -  15

2.1 What Is A Blockchains  - - - - - - -  14

2.2 Components of a Blockchain - - - - - -  15

2.3 Security Concerns  - - - - - - -  16

2.4 Blockchain Technology Breakdown - - - - -  16

2.5 Centralization And Decentralization - - - - -  17

2.7 The Rise of Cryptocurrency - - - - - -  18

3  Bitcoin at a Glance  - - - - - - - -  19

3.1 Bitcoin is DECENTRALIZED Currency - - - -  -  21

3.2 Open Source - - - - - - -  22 

3.3 Public Asset Ledger - - - - - - -  23

3.4 What is Bitcoin - - - - - - - -  24

3.5 The Origin of Bitcoin - - - - - - -  25

3.6 Bitcoin as Currency - - - - - - - 27

4  Buying and Storing Bitcoins - - - - - - -  29

4.1How to Obtain Bitcoins - - - - - - -  29

4.2 Getting registered on an exchange - - - - -  31

5  The Major Concepts In Cryptocurrency - Bitcoin  - - -  -  32

5.1 How Bitcoin Works in Simple Terms  - - - - -  33

5.2 Why does Bitcoin seem so complex? - - - - -  34

5.3 What Is Meant By Bitcoin Address - - - - -  34

5.4 How is Bitcoin Ledger different From Traditional Bank? -  -  35

5.5 How Do You Move Bitcoins from One Address to another (i.e., spend them)  36

5.5.1 The Private Key  - - - - - - -  36

5.6 The Bitcoin Wallet   - - - - - - 37

5.7 Buying Bitcoins the Easy Way - - - - - -  38

5.8 Storing Your Private Key(s)  - - - - - -  39

5.9 Hot Storage vs. Cold Storage - - - - - -  40

Chapter 1

Introduction

Cryptocurrencies have many different aspects, and can therefore be viewed from various angles, including the financial and economic perspective, legal perspective, political and sociological perspective, as well as technical and socio-technical perspectives. These very different viewpoints can be separated even further; for example, the technical aspects can be divided into the following non-exhaustive list of fields: cryptography, network and distributed systems, game theory, data science, and software and language security. In this book, the focus is placed on what is cryptocurrency and the technical perspectives that are necessary to understand this broad field.

In doing so, we also discuss aspects of blockchain and usable security, which are vital for the adoption of a cryptographic currency and, therefore, also go further to discuss Bitcoin that have brought popularity to cryptocurrencies.

Since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008 as a prototype for a decentralized cryptocurrency between 2008 and 2009, the field of cryptocurrency technologies has experienced a rapid growth in popularity. Those technologies that are based on the same or very similar fundamental principles as Bitcoin are commonly referred to as blockchains. The term blockchain itself was not directly introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in the original paper [https://bitcoin.org, 2008], but used early on within the Bitcoin community to refer to certain concepts of the cryptocurrency.

To date, over 700 different cryptocurrencies have been created [https://bitcoin.org, 2008]. Some of those currencies only had a very short lifespan or were merely conceived for fraudulent purposes, while others brought additional innovations and still have vital and vibrant communities today.

The mechanisms and underlying principles of most of these cryptocurrencies are, to a greater or lesser extent, derived from the original Bitcoin protocol. Several of these incarnations may only differ from Bitcoin in their choice of certain constants such as the target block interval or maximum number of currency units that will eventually come into existence. Others have switched to alternative proof-of-work algorithms (e.g., Litecoin, Dogecoin, Namecoin, Ethereum, Zcash, or have used different distributed consensus approaches (e.g., PeerCoin, Ripple).

The cryptographic currency community is as diverse as the possible viewpoints on the topic.

Cryptocurrencies are, as the name suggests, intended to be used as currencies. Therefore, they attract a variety of different people, including technology enthusiasts, businesses and investors, ideologists, researchers, cypherpunks, libertarians, public authorities and policy makers, financial regulators, banks, and also criminals, who exploit anonymity measures and make use of the fact that criminal investigation and de-anonymization techniques are lagging behind. In contrast to that, the distributed nature of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies also attracts

Reviews for An In-depth Overview of Cryptocurrency

[Nathan Daniels · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

In serious need of an editor and some middle school level proofreading.