Story of Cryptocurrency

Story of Cryptocurrency

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16 February, 2022
  • The First Digital Currency was created by American cryptographer David Chaum in 1983.
  • He invented an anonymous cryptographic electronic money called ecash.
  • Later, in 1995, he implemented it through Digicash, an early form of cryptographic e-payments that required user software to withdraw notes from a bank and designate specific encrypted keys before they can be sent to a recipient. That allowed the digital money to be untraceable by the bank, the government, or any third party.
  • The first decentralized cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, It was created in 2009.
Story of Cryptocurrency
  • Bitcoin was created by likely pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. It is not confirmed that it was him who created or was just a name given by the real creators.
  • Bitcoin has a proof-of-work scheme by which it verifies whether the transactions are right or not. It uses a cryptographic hash function - SHA-256 in it.
  • Another coin that goes by the name "Namecoin" was created in April 2011 as an attempt at forming a decentralized DNS, which would help to make internet censorship very difficult.
Story of Cryptocurrency
  • Soon after another famous coin was created in October 2011, Litecoin. Instead of SHA-256 like in Bitcoin, Litecoin uses scrypt as its hash function.
Story of Cryptocurrency
  • This way lots of Coins started were made and today there are a total of around 4,000 Cryptocurrencies.
  • As of April 2021, the total market value of cryptocurrency is more than USD 2 trillion.