What is Bitcoin?
Today Bitcoin cryptocurrency is a payment system introduced as fully open software in early 2009. Was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Every single payment in the system are recorded in a public open ledger using its own system of unit accounts, which has been called bitcoin. New payments work from peer-to-peer without any central repository or administrator, which has led nowhere and call bitcoin a decentralized virtual currency. However status of this currency is disputed by many people. More often refer to bitcoin as a cryptocurrency or digital currency. In theory bitcoins was created as a reward for payment processing work in which users offer their free computing power to correct verify and record payments into the open public ledger called mining. When individuals or companies engage in this activity in exchange for transaction fees and brand new created bitcoins. Bitcoins can be obtained in mining, in exchange for fiat money, products, and various services. Users can freely send and receive bitcoins electronically for, not very high, optional transaction fee using wallet software on a personal computer, mobile device, or a world wide web application. As a form of global payment for products and services has seen growth, and merchants have an incentive to accept the digital currency because of very low fees. They are lower than the 2-3% typically imposed by using credit card processors. |
What is Peercoin?
Peercoin cryptocurrency, also known as PPCoin or PPC, exist as peer-to-peer cryptocurrency utilizing both proof-of-stake and proof-of-work systems of processing. Peercoin is based on an August 2012 paper which listed the authors as Scott Nadal and Sunny King. Sunny King, who also created Primecoin, is a pseudonym. His involvement had diminished by November 2013, leaving King as Peercoin's sole core developer. Peercoin was inspired by bitcoin, and it shares much of the source code and technical implementation of bitcoin. The Peercoin source code is distributed under the MIT/X11 software license. Peercoin is the fourth largest minable cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Peercoin has a market cap of $30 million USD as of Jul 20, 2014. Unlike bitcoin, Namecoin, and Litecoin, Peercoin does not have a hard limit on the number of possible coins, but is designed to eventually attain an annual inflation rate of 1%. This feature, along with increased energy efficiency, aim to allow for greater long-term scalability. Peercoin's major distinguishing feature is that it uses a hybrid proof-of-stake/proof-of-work system. The proof-of-stake system was designed to address vulnerabilities that could occur in a pure proof-of-work system. With bitcoin, for example, there is a risk of attacks resulting from a monopoly on mining share. This is because rewards from mining are programmed to decline exponentially, which may decrease the incentive to mine. As miners decline, the likelihood of a monopoly increases, which leaves the network vulnerable to a 51% attack (a 51% attack is when a single entity possesses over half the mining share, which would allow this entity to theoretically double-spend a transaction involving their coins). With a proof-of-stake system, new coins are generated based on the holdings of individuals. In other words, someone holding 1% of the currency will generate 1% of all proof-of-stake coin blocks. This has the effect of making a monopoly more costly, and separates the risk of a monopoly from proof-of-work mining shares. |
What is Litecoin?
Very popular last years Litecoin was created using open source client in 2011. Author Charles Lee, a former Google employee. It was a some kind of fork modification of the Bitcoin client. Main goal was decrease block generation time, increased maximum number of produced coins, completely different hashing algorithm called scrypt, and a slightly changed graphical user interface. In 2013 during month the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massively increased and 100% growth within 24 hours. Litecoin become bigger and bigger and $1 billion market cap was reached but as 2015, its market capitalization rapidly back to 2013 level about 65 million with the price dropping lower than 1 USD. Technically Litecoin transactions are always recorded in the Litecoin blockchain web site used by most clients of LTC network. A new block appear in blockchain about every 3 minutes. A transaction is usually must be complete after six blocks, or about from 12 to 15 minutes. For smaller transactions, less than six blocks may be needed for much stronger security procedures. Payments in the LTC network are made to different addresses. Based on Base58-encoded hashes user open public keys. Addess includes numbers and letters which always begin with the letter L and 32 other letters and numbers. |
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