What are the 5 best digital currencies?

I guess the topic deserves a small introduction to what this whole cryptocurrency jazz is all about. Well, digital payments have replaced the whole idea of carrying cash with you! Whether you want food, groceries, cabs or even a general service, you can pay for everything digitally, but it’s not really like cash payments. Cash is untraceable, cash can be spent anonymously and more so cash is trusted. Escaping these problems was the promise made by bitcoin. It had the beautiful anonymity of cash and it was cash that was not printed by the government. Instead, it was made by a bit of code that was powered by the citizens of the internet and you could trust it. Today, anyone can buy crypto. A few sign-ups, smash in your credit card details and trade in your money for digital cash. Bitcoin got so popular that by the end of 2017, it was as valuable as the big banks it stood against. Today there are thousands of cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, and in this article, I’m going to list the top 5 cryptocurrencies.

1. Bitcoin

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency that started the whole decentralization movement. Without bitcoin, we would not be where we are today in terms of crypto. What made Bitcoin stand out was how it brought about a new perspective of trust. According to Bitcoin, no user is a trusted user and everything must be verified by public consensus which is achieved by a mathematical process called “proof of work”. We won’t get into the working of proof of work, but let’s just say its very resource heavy and equally trustworthy and hard to break. It was truly the first piece of tech that promised security over the internet. As of this day, the market capitalization of the world’s top digital currency is more than $125 billion, with a price per coin of more than $6547.

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2. Ethereum

Ethereum is an open-source & public blockchain based distributed computing platform for building decentralized applications. So, before the creation of Ethereum, blockchain applications were designed to do a very limited set of operations. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, for example, were developed exclusively to operate as peer-to-peer digital currencies. Vitalik Buterin, the mastermind behind Ethereum, envisioned his project as a platform for developers to write programs on the blockchain. This was brought about with the implementation of smart contracts which is basically a programme that runs on the blockchain and can be invoked by the users of the network. So basically this allows App developers to freely work on the blockchain without knowing its intricacies by using frameworks like Truffle. The cryptocurrency of Ethereum is called Ether and there are about 100 million of them in the market.

3. Ripple

Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network created by Ripple Labs Inc., a US-based technology company.

Ripple is built upon a distributed open source internet protocol and supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodities, or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes. It eases out the process of cross-border payments with its negligible transaction fees and super fast transaction times. Above that what makes it special is the consensus algorithm used which is called Byzantine fault tolerance based on the Byzantine general problem. It’s a method of eliminating faulty participators by bringing about a consensus through a majority poll.

4. Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoins popularity skyrocketing caused its own set of problems in terms of scalability. The number of transactions increased by leaps and bounds, the rate at which the blocks filled up were increasing as well. More often than not, people actually had to wait until new blocks were created so that their transactions would go through. This created a backlog of transactions, in fact, the only way to get your transactions prioritized is to pay a high enough transaction fee to attract and incentivize the miners to prioritize your transactions.

To solve this problem Bitcoin went through a hard fork and Bitcoin Cash was born. This was done with the implementation of SegWit which stands for segregated witness.

5. EOS

Lastly, we have EOS. EOS is a blockchain platform for the development of decentralized applications, similar to Ethereum in function. It makes dapp development a breeze by providing an operating system like set of functions and libraries for developers.

EOS brings together the best features and promises of the various smart contract technologies out there for e.g. the security of Bitcoin while maintaining the computing support of Ethereum, in one simple to use, massively scalable dapp platform for the everyday user. It provides a complete operating system for decentralized applications focused on the web with services like user authentication, cloud storage, and server hosting.