CEO,Motivator,Football Coach,Techie,Entrepreneur,Draft Guru, NUC Sports NUCSPORTS.COM. Agent Iathletes.com FB News- nucsportsmag.com, email [email protected] Feb 23 The 5 Big Cryptos: Uses and Features Everyone and their grandmas have been writing for all crypto-time about bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin… Separately.
It is rare to see a juxtaposition of the big five in the same article. Which is exactly why we need to do it in this article. So buckle up as we explore briefly the features that define these cryptos and their real-world uses. How do we know a coin is in the top 5? There are several parameters that can be used to measure a cryptos performance for some reasons.
Total Value in the Market the circulating coins in a particular blockchain multiplied by the current value of one coin in the market will give us the total value of that crypto. We can then total up all the value expressed in another asset like USD gauge the dominance of a particular cryptocurrency.
This is the main measure of how big a crypto is because it is a reflection of the money being pumped into its blockchain the world over. It is known as market capitalization and is the most popular. It is best articulated at coinmarketcap.com But other measures of dominance do exist. They include: Maximum Supply: Most cryptos have a designated maximum number of coins that will ever exist. Bitcoin and BCH are at 21million, Litecoin will have 84million, and Ripple has 100 billion.
Ethereum does not. Other parameters include, but are not limited to, the unit price of each coin, the 24-hour trading volume and the possibilities of scaling. So now let us look at each of the big five and their current or future use cases.
Bitcoin’s breakdown The father of all cryptos, bitcoin is the largest by market capitalization. Maximum supply of 21 million bitcoins by 2140, with 16.9 million already in circulation Primary acquisition is done through mining Uses the proof of work algorithm which currently requires high computational power. Has 1MB blocks but trying to implement Bitcoin use cases Surprisingly, Bitcoin is one of the cryptos whose main uses are very limited.
In fact, Bitcoin is primarily simply a currency. A means of transfer and storage of value. But due to its rising popularity and the emergence of the exchange markets, bitcoin soon evolved into an asset people wanted to have. Without mining it. So they started giving money to people who have it to acquire it. And that is how it has become a commodity. A speculative instrument that is being used for speculation holding, betting and prediction markets.
Ethereum The second generation blockchain, and the progenitor of the smart contract based blockchains to handle other assets other than currency. A brainchild of Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum runs on ether. In essence, the Ether is not a currency. It is a token.
A fuel that runs the Ethereum blockchain. But the sheer volume of applications being built on the blockchain makes Ether a hot property as people look for it to run applications. For example, most other tokens found in cryptosphere run on the Ethereum blockchain. They are often regarded to as ERC20 compatible tokens because they operate on the Ethereum standard. They include such major currencies as OmiseGo and EOS , QTUM and Tron . Ether has therefore also evolved as a commodity that can also be held for speculative purposes.
But the intended use case is as the gas that runs the applications that are on the blockchain. These applications include games, media, scientific work, records and Decentralized autonomous organisations also known as DAOs. Ripple While questions still abound on whether Ripple is a cryptocurrency due to its dalliance with centralized organisations and a rather jealous and un-blockchain kleptocracy around its network, it is a consistently high-ranking asset. Built around the idea of exchanging fiat currencies worldwide at great speeds and minimum costs, Ripple has built a fearsome reputation as a fiat-to-crypto moderator. A cash transfer system for banks and other financial institutions. It runs on what is known as the Ripple Money Transfer Protocol. Ripple’s network is the world’s most extensive financial institution network, called RippleNet.
The coin is not minable and is not as decentralized as most cryptos. As such, Ripple has benefitted from its centralized model to standardize transaction costs to 0.0001XRP per transaction, regardless of the size of cash that the banks move.
And it is possible to use RippleNet without using XRP, so long as there can be a clear bank to bank trust line. This is mainly achieved using three Ripple Features; xCurrent : Allows IOU messages between banks to clear payments with speed and absolute transparency xRapid : Helps to reduce the need for reserves in gateway banks or overdependence on central banks xVia : Uses the standard RippleNet Interface to send money across borders seamlessly. Bitcoin Cash The bitcoin cash wallets started rejecting bitcoin blocks on August 1, 2017, after the SegWit fallout. Bitcoin cash has some fascinating phenomena that make it have a relatively stable survival rate; It is supported by Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin XT.
Bitcoin core miners can mine BCH. This allows for opportunistic mining. BCH can, therefore, enjoy BTC’s massive hash power at times. BCH is at the summit of the market capitalization, currently sitting fourth behind Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. It invariably benefits from any fallouts within bitcoin. It has seen a stoic price increase over time as a result. Bitcoin Cash has 8MB blocks.
This gives it reasonable fees and transaction speed.
Like many bitcoin hard forks, BCH does not have any significant difference in its uses from Bitcoin. Litecoin Charlie Lee formerly worked for Google and was among the earliest Bitcoin enthusiasts. However, early on after toying with the bitcoin source code, he identified several things that needed tweaking. He knew Bitcoin would be a gold standard or a store of value, and he, therefore, set out to make a few improvements to bitcoin core through the Litecoin hard fork; Increase coin abundance to try and create a ‘silver’ coin as opposed to the Gold that is Bitcoin Decrease mining time from Bitcoin’s 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes Increase transaction speed Discourage high traffic of small amounts of coin holding. With memory-hard coding using Scrypt, Lee discouraged the escalation of the mining difficulty associated with bitcoin, and also reduced the mining time from 10 minutes to 2.
5 minutes. So essentially, he wanted Litecoin to be a lower denomination currency to bitcoin without changing the functionalities much.
A Silver Currency of sorts that would hopefully find street-level functionality as a mainstream currency. Final Thoughts. Let’s keep bitcoin aside. It is not an altcoin. It is the Genesis crypto. It is what it is, and most altcoins try to be better than it. Of the other four that sit at the top of the food chain, only Ethereum, which comes second by market capitalization, has a truly significantly different purpose other than bitcoin. It is a fuel used to run Ethereum based blockchains, and as Proof of Stake to secure the network.
Ripple is different from bitcoin hard forks like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash in that it is not completely decentralized, and works with major money movers who are themselves decentralized. Whatever these cryptos are, they are the big five. They cannot be wished away, and it is good to dig deeper into what they hold for the future. .
