CRYPTOCURRENCY
What
Cryptocurrency is coined of 2 terms, Crypto and currency. Crypto
means hidden or secret while currency is a system of money,
generally used by the individual country.
A cryptocurrency often termed as crypto currency or crypto for
short, is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange
wherein individual coin ownership records are stored in a ledger
existing in a form of computerized database using strong
cryptography to secure transaction records or to control the
creation of additional coins, and to verify the transfer of coin
ownership.
It does not exist is physical form or paper money and is also not
issued by any central authority.
Crypto currency generally use decentralized control as opposed to
centralized digital currency and central banking system.
Since it's decentralized control, thus, it works on distributed
ledger technology, typically a blockchain, that serves as public
financial transaction database.
Every new transaction data is saved in form of a block on
computers connected to same network and every new data block
is chained with the previous block.
Why
The main reason why cryptocurrency has any value is
Blockchain,why one should use it is it's ease-of-use. All you need
is a smart device, an internet connection and instantly you
become your own bank making payments and money transfers
and performing everything which a bank can.
When and Where
Cryptocurrency was first developed as an electronic money but in
centralized control by an American cryptographer, David Chaum
in 1983 which he used to call ecash. Later in 1995, he implented
this electronic money through his corporation Digicash for next
three years at in 1998, Digicash was declared bankruptcy and sold
its assets.
Many more attempts were made to create crypto(s) since then
but all of them were centralized. It was only Bitcoin which was
first decentralized cryptocurrency developed in 2009 by
presumably pseudonymous developer, Santoshi Nakamato which
can be an individual or possibly a group of programmers.
There are numerous types of crypto(s) available such as:
Bitcoin or BTC, Litecoin or LTC, ETH, ZEC, XLM,etc.
All of them combined known as altcoins.
Most of the bitcoins uses SHA-256 hashing algorithm
How
Crytocurrency can be used through cryptocurrency wallets which
provides you public and private keys or addresses for recieving
and spending cryptos respectively.
Minning
For crypto(s), Mining is a validation of transactions as for
successful miners, they receive a cryptocurrency as a reward thus
decreasing transaction fee for the particular miner.
A cryptocurreny Miner is basically a Supercomputer with even
more powers and modified specifications to help it with faster
hashing and problem solving, authenticating and storing
consumer data in encrypted formats.
Miners require some additional electronic machines such as
FGPAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and ASIC (Application
Specific Integrated Circuits).
Both, a supercomputer and a miner requires high amount of
power but the units for power consumption for supercomputers
like PARAM Yuva,Sidhi or Tianhe 1-A uses electricity ranging from
1 MW to 4 MW per second while Miners requires 120 GW to 63
TW per second.
According to a February 2018 report from Fortune, Iceland has
become heaven for cryptocurrency miners in part because of its
cheap electricity.
According to reports of 2019, alone Bitcoin Miners power
consumption was of 0.02% of global consumption which is
equivalent to Switzerland's power consumption; Now you can
have a rough idea as there are various crypto miners.
In March 2018, the city of Plattsburg in upstate New York put an
18-months moroatorium or legal delay on all crypo miners in an
effort to preserve natural resources