cryptocurrency
Learn how cryptocurrency works and the pros and cons of shifting to a digital economy.
Earn DogeCoins Online Playing on Free Dogecoin
Earn DogeCoins Online Playing on Free Dogecoin – You will already be aware that faucet platforms are being part of a wave of fashion among those who want to enter the world of cryptocurrencies but who are not yet encouraged to invest their own capital.
By techjustify4 years ago in 01
Is Axie Going to Die? Think Twice and Think About It Again
It is without a doubt that Axie Infinity is still the number one and the largest play and earn blockchain game since its launch in March 2018. With a mass number of 2 million active monthly users at the start of the year 2022, the game heavily relies on the play and earn concept. As of this day, the game is facing a major economic crisis that has resulted in the rapid decline of players.
By Gaze All Over4 years ago in 01
What new business models has cryptocurrency hype created?
Cryptocurrency payments between people, companies and robots Boundary erasure. Leaving aside issues of financial regulation in individual jurisdictions, cross-border settlement is technically possible in seconds from sending to receiving funds. Such speed is not yet available to "oldsters" like Bitcoin or Ethereum. But technologically it is already possible, for example, EOS has an average transaction processing speed of 1.5 seconds.
By Sander Klakegg4 years ago in 01
How To Become A Blockchain Developer
Are you interested in learning how to build and create blockchain applications? If so, this guide is for you! In this article, we will outline the steps necessary to become a blockchain developer. We will provide tips and advice on what resources to explore, what programming languages to learn, and how to find quality online courses. By the end of this guide, you will have everything you need to begin your journey into the fascinating world of blockchain development.
By PERFECT GAMING4 years ago in 01
What is a cryptocurrency and its different types?
There are currently more than 1500 different types of cryptocurrencies. But what are they and how do you invest in them? Cryptocurrencies make a great investment opportunity, but with so many different types of coins available, it can be difficult to know where to begin. There are several main categories of cryptocurrency: first is the type of blockchain technology on which it’s built; the second is its utility as a digital token. There are various platforms through which you can track crypto wallet transactions such as Block Sonar, which is the best blockchain explorer and crypto wallet tracking platform. This article will explain the difference between these various types and help you decide which kind of cryptocurrency you want to invest in.
By Shaun David4 years ago in 01
An in-depth understanding of Blockchain in the Fintech industry
To understand how blockchain software development can change the financial technology industry, it’s important to know what the technology entails and how it works. To start, think of blockchain as an online ledger that records transactions across multiple computers, or nodes, in such a way that they can never be erased, hacked, or tampered with. By connecting various servers together into one network of verified transaction information, blockchains ensure accountability and transparency across the board. Once you understand how it works, it becomes easier to see how blockchain technology can change the FinTech industry.
By Joe Harkins4 years ago in 01
What Is Blockchain Sharding?
Blockchain companies use sharding to partition databases and increase scalability, allowing them to process more transactions per second. Sharding is a key mechanism under the Ethereum Blockchain and one of its critical components. In fact, sharding allows Blockchain protocols to overcome the scalability trilemma (as a Blockchain grows, it remains scalable, secure, and decentralized).
By BlockchainX4 years ago in 01
Bitcoin as a Store of Value
For now, let’s put aside the argument about whether ‘store of value’ is a valid property of money, or if it should be an attribute of an asset. Instead, let’s ask the question, what do you want from your store of value? What is its job? Is it its job to make you richer so you can buy more toys, or is its job to maintain its value so you can plan your life well? And if the job of the thing is to make you richer so you can buy more toys, how much volatility and downside risk are you willing to stomach? Are we talking about a short-term store of value, perhaps a speculative investment, or a long-term store of value, often a lower risk asset? Bitcoin as a speculative investment has performed amazingly well. Anything that starts at a price of zero, and is not currently at a price of zero, is great. Bitcoin started at zero value in 2009 and now, less than ten years later, each Bitcoin is worth thousands of dollars. So it has certainly appreciated in value since its creation. But would you buy it now? Would you move all your savings into this asset in order to store value (as opposed to gamble and hoping for a quick price appreciation)? Well, due to its price volatility, which is very high compared to most fiat currencies, the answer is probably no if you are looking for a stable store of value. As a long-term store of value I suppose you want, as a minimum, something that can be used to buy a basket of goods in twenty years’ time roughly identical to the basket you can buy with it now. So, if you had bought it at the right time, Bitcoin has certainly been a good investment, but its volatility makes it a nauseating store of value. Does Bitcoin, or do other cryptocurrencies, have the potential to keep value over the long term, as some people expect from gold? Possibly. According to its current protocol rules, bitcoins are created at a known rate (12.5 BTC every 10 minutes or so)—and that rate will decrease over time. So the supply of it is understood and predictable, capped to almost 21 million BTC and not subject to arbitrary creation, unlike fiat currencies10. Limiting the supply of something can help maintain its value if demand is stable or increases, though the downside of a known, predictable, and completely inelastic supply unrelated to a fluctuating demand results in perpetual price volatility11, which is not good if you are looking for price stability. Bitcoin as a Unit of Account As a unit of account, Bitcoin fails miserably, due to its price volatility against USD and everything else in the world. The fact that there are almost no merchants who are willing to price items in bitcoins (not even merchants who sell cryptocurrency related paraphernalia) is evidence that bitcoins are not a good unit of account. You wouldn’t keep your accounts in BTC. You wouldn’t record the price of your laptop in BTC. You certainly wouldn’t do your year-end bookkeeping in BTC12, and if you tried to file mandatory accounts in BTC you would fall foul of accounting standards in all jurisdictions. If you were a masochist, you could prepare an inventory and denominate everything in BTC, but first you’d figure out the price of things in USD (say, my laptop is worth about $200), then you’d convert that number to a Bitcoin number at a ‘what is the price of Bitcoin in dollars at this very second?’ ratio. So then, very briefly, you could say ‘all my worldly possessions are worth 3.0364 BTC’. Within minutes or hours, that BTC number would almost certainly be meaningless as the BTC to USD price fluctuates so rapidly. Monetary economist JP Koning compared the price volatility of Bitcoin to gold and made the following observation on Twitter13: Will the price volatility of Bitcoin decrease? It is anyone’s guess, but I personally doubt it. One argument I used to hear was, ‘When the price of BTC gets really high, the price volatility will decrease because it will take a lot more money to bully the price up and down’. The argument is flawed. A price can be high, but if a market is illiquid, small amounts of money can still push the price around. Stability is determined more by the liquidity of a market (how many people are willing to buy and sell at any price point), than the price of an asset. But even liquid markets can move quickly if the market’s perception of the value of the asset changes suddenly. Also, this argument is predicated on the price of Bitcoin getting really high… There is no good reason why the price of Bitcoin should ever go ‘really high’. Furthermore, as discussed earlier, Bitcoin’s supply is inelastic. If there is a spike in demand, there is no impact on the rate at which bitcoins are generated, unlike normal goods and services, so there is no dampening effect on the price, and this holds true for any price point—even if volatility decreased, traders may just take bigger bets, often with leverage, which would then move the price again. At the time of writing there is a quest for ‘stable coins’—cryptocurrencies whose prices are relatively stable compared to some other thing, for example a US dollar. Unless they are backed 1 to 1 with the relevant asset, stable coins are very hard to produce because essentially you are trying to peg the price of something dynamic to something else with a different dynamic, and as we will see in the next section about history of money, no one has ever been successful at this in the long term: Pegs always eventually break. If a successful stable coin were to emerge, things could become more interesting14. There is one case where BTC may be used as a unit of account: when valuing baskets of other cryptocurrencies. If you are a normal trader trading normal assets like shares, it is a good idea to understand the current value of your assets in your home currency—for example USD, EUR, or GBP. If you are a cryptocurrency trader, you probably still want to understand your total asset value in your home currency, but in this very specific case, you may also want to understand your total balance in BTC as it is the market leader in the cryptocurrency world—you could say BTC is the USD of cryptocurrencies. Perhaps your investors let you manage some bitcoins with the hope that you will turn their bitcoins into more bitcoins. In this case, the value of your assets in BTC is more important than the value in USD. This is a niche case. The Current State of Cryptocurrencies as Money Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, summarised the current state of the moneyness of Bitcoin during a Q&A session at Regent’s University London on 19 February 201815: ‘[Bitcoin] has pretty much failed thus far on…the traditional aspects of money. It is not a store of value because it is all over the map. Nobody uses it as a medium of exchange…’ Bitcoin may be suffering growing pains in its infancy, but this doesn’t mean that we should write it off and that the story must end here. According to the Bitcoin Obituary website,16 Bitcoin has been declared dead over 300 times! But it lives on—at the very least, it still trades on exchanges with a nonzero price. It seems that people try to fit Bitcoin into an existing bucket (‘It is a currency asset property / digital gold’), and when it exhibits some properties that do not match others in that bucket, it is declared a failure. Maybe the answer is to not try to fit it into any existing bucket, but to design or define a new bucket, and to judge Bitcoin and other cryptoassets on their own merits. Also note that central bankers have a potential conflict of interest when commenting on new forms of money. Central bankers have a critical role to maintain monetary and economic stability, and their tools (quantity of money in the economy and the price of borrowing money) are applied to their respective fiat currencies. Any new form of money, if widely adopted and if not under the control of the central bank, could potentially undermine the ability of the central bank to fulfil its mandate. New forms of money could be disruptive and destabilise economies, which, from a central banker’s point of view is not a good thing. So you wouldn’t expect central bankers to warmly embrace new forms of money that are not under their control.
By Daniel Joseph 4 years ago in 01
Top 5 Solana Blockchain Development Companies
If you’ve attempted to dive into this secret thing called blockchain, you’d be an excuse to draw back in horror at the sheer opaqueness of the technical idiom that is often used to figure it. So before we get into blockchain and how blockchain technology is changing the world, let’s discuss what blockchain actually is.
By stella jackson4 years ago in 01
Why Cryptocurrencies Work
Now that you've seen why compared to gold, fiat currencies aren't real money; it's time to turn our attention to cryptocurrencies as a solid alternative, why they are much closer to gold than money as we know it today is, and why they'd work better than fiat currencies. Low Risk of Disruption According to David John Grundy, the global blockchain head of one of the world's biggest banks, Danske Bank, the only way anyone can stop or shut blockchains down is by shutting down the Internet itself. And by now, I believe you know that is practically impossible. It's like saying somebody can keep the sun from shining or the wind from blowing. Portability Unlike fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies can be easily transferred from one account to another using online gadgets such as computers, tablets or even smartphones. With fiat currencies, you'll need to do so physically or through the same bank. Plus, you don't have to bring them with you physically because they're stored in the Internet. So you can go anywhere with a good Internet connection and bring your cryptocurrencies with you regardless of the amount! Better Value Storage You can only consider an asset as a good value storage if it's able to keep relatively unchanged levels of utility or satisfaction over time. Applying this to financial assets, it means having the ability to maintain purchasing power over time. A financial asset's ability to keep value can be estimated through what is called fundamental analysis, which takes into consideration both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of such an asset. The ability to keep or store value has become the primary foundation for investing or HODLing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. But can cryptocurrencies be really relied on to store value and if they are, can they do it well? The Gold Comparison Don't be surprised to find cryptocurrencies being compared or likened to precious metals, i.e., Bitcoin to gold and Litecoin or Ether to silver when justifying cryptocurrencies' ability to store value over the long term. One of the reasons - albeit a shallow one - is the color of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoins are visually represented as color gold while Litecoins are visually represented as silver. But there are more than just visual cues that justify the belief in cryptocurrencies' ability to store values like the two most precious metals on Earth. We mustn't dismiss behavioral economics that underlie both asset classes. When more and more people start believing that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ether, or Litecoin are able to store value the way precious metals like gold and silver can, it can help push the prices of these cryptocurrencies upward. When their prices do go up over time, then it's highly possible that they'll be able to keep or maintain their values within a specific period of time. Comparisons to precious metals, e.g., Bitcoins to gold, can be a very strong factor that can influence the perspective of general markets regarding Bitcoin’s and altcoin's abilities to retain or store value in the long term. And this can have a huge impact in terms of the number of investors who'll view cryptocurrencies in general as good investment vehicles. Limited Quantity, i.e., Deflationary Just like gold in its physical form, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin typically have a limited quantity of units, which is defined or set in their respective blockchain protocols. Bitcoin, for example, has a cap of only 21 million units that can ever be created. Litecoin on the other hand has an 84-million unit cap that's also controlled by its operating protocols. This is what makes cryptocurrencies deflationary or disinflationary over the long haul. Remember our discussion earlier on supply and demand and how asset values are affected by changes in both? Because cryptocurrencies have a fixed number of units that will ever be minted, their supplies relative to the quantities of goods and services it can buy in the future is effectively shrinking. That means its purchasing power can be expected to increase over the long haul and can have deflationary effects on goods and services. Independence from Other Asset Classes Compared to all other financial asset classes such as stocks or fiat currencies whose values fluctuate depending on the pronouncements or moves made by central bankers or financial regulators, the real value of gold and silver can't be manipulated by any central monetary authority regardless of their macro-policy decisions. Because of its autonomy from any monetary authority, precious metals like gold and silver are able to withstand price shocks over time, which makes them very good storages of value in the long term. Cryptocurrencies are like gold in that they're generally decentralized and autonomous by nature. This means just like gold, government decisions or policy changes have little direct impact, if at all, on their long-term values. The amount of decentralization and autonomy can be a hot discussion topic among cryptocurrency users and investors, where some favor the full autonomy version while others feel more comfortable with some compromise, i.e., hybrid combinations of some form of governance (not from the government) and decentralization. In general, cryptocurrency governance models can vary greatly with some adopting a balanced power structure among its users when it comes to major decision making on one end while others go for the benevolent dictatorship model on the other hand. And in between the two are various other combination or hybrid models. But generally speaking, cryptocurrencies with more decentralized systems may do a better risk in terms of hedging against the risk of their values being influenced or tampered with by regulators. Underlying or Intrinsic Values Assets that are considered to be true storages of value have underlying characteristics that serve as foundations for their values. In layman's terms, such assets have intrinsic utility values, i.e., practical uses that give them their values. Gold, for example, is used for manufacturing jewelry and electronic parts such as semi-conductors. Land or real estate's underlying value or utility is their capacity for having structures built upon them and the amount of foot traffic their areas get. When it comes to underlying utility value, cryptocurrencies have a lot of potential. In particular, cryptocurrencies hold a huge promise in terms of changing the way financial transactions are done online, which include contracts enforcement, records keeping, and payments. As the use of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ether becomes accepted in more and more markets, their practical utility values increase even more, which can increase their values over the long haul. Impossible To Fake The blockchain technology is a revolutionary one in terms of facilitating online transactions and data or record keeping. Being such, it's practically impossible to produce counterfeit versions of it. And as blockchains continue to evolve, it becomes even more impossible - if such a term exists - to produce fake cryptocurrencies that can be used to buy stuff. Impossible to Control Particularly for cryptocurrencies whose market capitalizations are already in the billions of dollars such as Bitcoin and Ether, one would need a huge amount of money to transact enough units of such cryptocurrencies just to be able to influence or manipulate their prices. When you take a look at Bitcoin, for example, whose average market capitalization hovers somewhere around US$50 billion, one would need at least US$10 billion to play around just to be able to manipulate demand and supply. Even if you're talking about Ether, whose average market cap is much smaller at "only" around US$25 billion to US$30 billion, one would still need a couple of billion dollar worth of transactions just to sway prices to his or her favor. The Little Guy Gets In More Unlike stocks and other financial assets that require relatively high amounts of investment capital, cryptocurrencies have low barriers to entry. That means even people who only have relatively small amounts of money to invest can easily get in. As such, cryptocurrencies, in general, have a higher number of investors participating in them to the point that it becomes practically impossible to manipulate the market. Relative Security Lastly, cryptocurrencies are virtually impossible to rob if you do your homework of using the right kind of storage, which we'll talk about later. But if you just leave them in your cryptocurrency exchange account, that's the only time when it's at high risk of being hacked and stolen. So if you follow my advice later on regarding storage of your Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies, you can make your cryptocurrencies so safe that they'll be practically impossible to steal.
By Daniel Joseph 4 years ago in 01
