One thing I like to do is try to write a list of 10 things I know about a familiar topic. Here's what I know about cryptocurrency.
- Digital money is much older than cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency's oldest token is Bitcoin, which recently celebrated its 10th birthday.
- Cryptocurrency is actually two things. One is a token, and the other is the blockchain. The token is the closest thing to a currency. The blockchain is more like a public database that can't be changed once an item is put into it.
- The cryptocurrency community differentiates its tokens (BTC, ETH, LTC, DOGE, etc.) from "fiat currencies" (USD, CAD, EUR, JPY, etc.), the kind of money that most people use daily.
- CoinMarketCap.com shows the top 100 currencies on its homepage by market capitalization. What that means is that it shows how much money people have put (store?) in to the top currencies. As of this morning, Bitcoin's market cap was \(98.3 billion (USD) and the smallest in the top 100 was\)25.9 billion (USD).
- CoinMarketCap.com also tracks 5,201 other currencies across 20,923 markets for a total market capitalization of $154,378,382,638
- Jaxx Liberty is a wallet service that allows you to easily create wallets for 85-90 different currencies and transfer funds between them. This is a great way to buy/sell cryptocurrency for fiat money. It is a solid way to track your assets across multiple currencies, though.
- Ethereum is a currency that is meant to "programmable". One of the things that means is that other tokens can be created based on Ethereum. This holds a lot of promise, and recently a few such tokens have become popular. One of these is DAI, created by MakerDAO.
- MakerDAO is one of the leaders in something called Decentralized Finance (a.k.a. DeFi) a small but significant movement tracked at DeFi Pulse. The idea of DeFi is that everything takes place on the blockchain (see #2), meaning that every transaction is available for anyone curious to explore with tools like MKR.tools
- Brave is working to change the way advertising on the web works with the Basic Attention Token (BAT). The germ of the idea is that we should reward content creators with our attention, and the more attention, the more that creator deserves. Built on Google Chrome, the Brave Browser have a bunch of cool features, including the ability to use extensions from the Chrome Web Store like MetaMask.
- The world of cryptocurrency contains more than it's fair share of scams and scammers. Mizes and LTCMiner are two that I recently fell for. Do not follow in my footsteps!
This isn't even scratching the surface of the topic of cryptocurrency, just 10 things that came off the top of my mind.
Full disclosure: None of the links above are affiliate links. Nor do I advocate the use of any tools or apps below. This information is merely for my (and hopefully your) entertainment and in no way constitutes advice about investment or anything else, except Brave Browser. Seriously, if you're not using it, you should consider getting a better browsing experience.