The arrival of Bitcoin in 2009 was a technological and economic advance that laid the foundations of what we know today as the cryptocurrency market. This term that is now becoming so fashionable defines a new totally digital economy with paradigms that are very different from the "real" economy and that invites us to debate whether they are future projects or only speculative products or without real utility:
Traditional financial agents disappear and therefore it is a decentralized economy.
Economy based on P2P networks where users are the ones who give value to the currency and validity to their operations.
It cannot be forged and guarantees the security of transactions (irreversible).
Anonymous and personal economy.
Instant transactions.
On these and other premises, we have seen how other alternative currencies have been born that develop better technologies that differentiate them from each other, different purposes or simply imitations, so there are some key concepts that must be understood because they will be recurring in the future. .
Mining
Bitcoin appeared with a very tempting characteristic for its reception to the public: Whoever discovered new currencies took a succulent commission. How were new coins discovered? Solving mathematical operations called Hash with increasingly powerful computers. This process is called mining. There are 21 million Bitcoins of which about 5 million remain to be discovered, and more and more processing power is needed to solve these operations and discover new currencies. Such is the amount of processing that is needed today that the energy consumed to process this information already exceeds the annual electricity consumption of dozens of countries in the world and a significant hardware shortage (mostly graphics cards with powerful GPUs) to solve hashes more and more efficiently.
Not all digital currencies can be mined as some go on the market with all the capitalization in block, that creates two groups of currencies: those that can be mined and those that cannot.
Blockchain
One of the most interesting premises that the Bitcoin system presented in 2009 was its registration and validation of the operations made with the currency. All transactions are registered and validated in a cumulative, decentralized and public book (database). This is precisely one of the transparency and security features on which most of the Cryptocurrencies are based and if one day a coin takes over the digital currency market, it will almost certainly have this feature.
Wallet.
It is a digital wallet where we keep our coins. Each currency has its own software that allows us to download our wallet on our computer (through great security measures) and save new coins under our responsibility.
There are also online wallets (exchanges) that, in addition to saving our money, allow us to exchange currencies with other users from around the world in an immense digital currency stock market where many millions of dollars move every minute.
