The Most Important Altcoin Terms and Definitions

 Blockchain – the simplest possible definition of blockchain technology is that it’s a decentralized database that can’t be manipulated, making it un-hackable.

Coin exchange is a market where buyers and sellers trade Bitcoins and Altcoins.

Dapp stands for decentralized application – referring to apps written in the blockchain.

Encryption is information that can only be unlocked with a private key code.

ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is an opportunity to purchase digital coins for the first time from a new blockchain currency.

Miner is a computer validating blockchain transactions.

A Public Key is used to transfer coins publicly, in and out of a wallet.

A Private key is a key to open a wallet.

Satoshi is the smallest denomination of Bitcoin – one hundred millionth of a single Bitcoin.

A Wallet is a digital device used to store, send, and receive digital currency. Examples are Jaxx and Exodus.

 

Miners and Cryptocurrencies

Miners are part of the blockchain network that aid in verifying and recording the transactions of cryptocurrency. In exchange, they are compensated with a small amount of the cryptocurrency being transacted. The act of mining, thus, involves offering your computing power to the network in exchange for some cryptocurrency.

Verification and recording protocols vary by Altcoin currency. Computing power and hardware requirements for each blockchain network can differ.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Limited Concurrent Transactions

  The Bitcoin block system requires connection and confirmation from the peer-to-peer network to be verified. Because each block contains a limited record of transactions and an upper limit to the number of new transactions that can be written, there’s a limit to how many people can buy and sell with the system at any given time. As more and more vendors and individuals use Bitcoin to do business, the number of transactions per second increases, and the peer-to-peer network is becoming congested, with some operations without transaction fees taking hours to clear. Whereas conventional payment systems like credit cards can simply expand their connections and processing power to speed up processing, the isolated peer-to-peer nature of bitcoin doesn’t allow it to scale with the global financial system. Black Market Appeal A central principle to the design of the Bitcoin system is that there is no single transactional processing authority. As a result, no single user can be locked out o
Read more

Bitcoin Mining Has Diminishing Returns

  A few years ago when the Bitcoin system was new, individual users “mined” for new Bitcoins at a rapid pace. Bitcoin mining software used local processors, and even extra processors like a computer’s graphics card, to calculate hashes for the next block in the blockchain. While the number of people using and “mining” Bitcoin was low, each user doing the mining would randomly confirm the next block at a higher pace, generating new Bitcoins for his or her account quickly. But this boom in generation couldn’t last. The Bitcoin system is designed to make each new block more difficult to find than the last one, reducing the number of randomized Bitcoins that are generated and distributed. That means that as time goes on, each individual mining for them has to work harder and harder (in a figurative sense—it’s the computer that’s working harder and using more electricity, and thus, costing more conventional money). As the number of individual Bitcoins grows, the amount of Bitcoins rewarde
Read more