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What Exactly Is Ripple?

by hotshed71

The cryptocurrency universe continues to defy the odds and prove its doubters wrong as we settle into this year. The industry despite facing very serious challenges from the far east (with some of its biggest markets like China and South Korea making threats of imposing serious restrictions), continues to show resilience as the markets have stabilized after an intermittent dip in value. This is an industry that now has over 1400 distinct coins and tokens in circulation, well beyond the early days when Bitcoin was the only the game in town. Among the latest rising stars of the crypto world is Ripple, and in this piece we will take an overview of what it is all about

ripple

ripple

Definition
Ripple is one of the earlier blockchain based altcoins to come online in the industry whose focus is not entirely aligned with the rest of the crypto outfits. Ripple is a distinct blockchain run service which seeks to aid the present financial industries deliver better service and is not looking to either uproot or replace them, as much rest of the crypto industry is deadest on doing. Ripple allows anyone to use its ultra fast network to send anything of value in a tokenized form, ranging from other cryptocurrency, fiat money or even mobile credits, in an extremely fast, user friendly and cost effective ecosystem that is completely compatible with the fiat industry all over the world.

Features of Ripple

Ripple is different kind of cryptocurrency, whose similarity with the rest of the industry only ends with the fact that the blockchain technology is what powers it. Some of the distinct features that Ripple has include:

Centralization:
Almost every blockchain based cryptocurrency or token harps on its decentralization as one of the basic features that make them awesome. Ripple is one that bucks this trend as it is not a decentralized network but a centralized one with a company that owns the entire network. Ripple can be deployed to be used in a diverse range of uses, but the hope of its creators is that it will gain prominence by providing services to the present banking and financial market industries and as such a decentralized network with no one in control could never achieve that.

Transaction Speed:
Another key feature that stands Ripple apart is in the fact that it is among the fastest blockchain products till date. Unlike Bitcoin which takes an inordinate amount of time to initiate and successfully conclude any given transaction (with some taking days), Ripple has a much faster network that is able to conclude any transaction to any part of the planet within 3 seconds, no matter how big the actual transaction might be

Mining Process:
Ripple is not like most other digital monies, as it is not mined by individuals using specialized mining hardware that is coupled to a computer. Ripple tokens are all pre-mined, and the total 100 billion of them have all been minted. About 40 billion of the Ripple Token is already in circulation with the rest been kept by the company to be sold in tranches to the buying public.

Differences Between Litecoin and Bitcoin

by hotshed71

The year 2017 will forever be remembered as a special boom year for the entire cryptocurrency industry. Bitcoin which always seems to dominate the news headlines witnessed an overall growth of over 1300% throughout the year, and at a given time was worth as much as 20 times its value from the beginning of the year before shedding some of that in a price correction.

Despite its love of the limelight, Bitcoin is far from being the biggest beneficiary of the price surge in 2017, Litecoin was among those that saw their prices surge several thousand percents from about $4, to about $400 at its peak. As a refresher, we will go over what make this altcoin different from Bitcoin and what it brings to the table for its users.

 

What is Litecoin?
Litecoin is a blockchain based cryptocurrency that was the creation of Ex Google Engineer Charlie Lee, who created it in 2014 to be what he termed the Sliver to Bitcoin. Litecoin is among the first altcoins in the industry and works broadly the same way Bitcoin does in both its mining and transaction, putting pressure on what was being perceived as some of Bitcoin’s points of weaknesses in providing a much more efficient peer to peer means of transaction between people no matter where they are located. Litecoin despite its improvement on the working indices of Bitcoin has always maintained it is just a currency that seeks to compliment rather than replace Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Vs Litecoin: The Differences
The following are the major differences between Litecoin and its big cousin the Bitcoin

Coin Cap: Both Bitcoin and Litecoin share a similarity in that both digital assets recognize the importance of scarcity in driving up demand and value of any given commodity, and as such both currencies come with a rather limited supply of currencies on their separate blockchains. However, while Bitcoin comes with a maximum supply of 21 million Bitcoins to be ever created on its blockchain, Litecoin has a more relaxed number which stands at 84 million Litecoins that will ever exist.

Transaction Speeds: One of the reasons that inspired the creation of Litecoin was the fact that Bitcoin was forecasted to become a rather slow and terribly tedious means of transaction for its users. A single block takes a minimum of 10 minutes to create on the Bitcoin blockchain compared to just over 2 minutes on the Litecoin chain. This makes Litecoin at least four times faster than Bitcoin as means of transaction

Cheaper Fees: Another perceived point of weakness in Bitcoin and which has been forcing a lot of businesses to abandon using it as their preferred means of exchange is that it has become terribly expensive to use, which makes it uneconomical to use for making micro payments. Litecoin in order to solve this problem gives its users the chance to use a currency that offers them close to zero transaction fees making it one the best choices for businesses that accept small payments for their goods and services.

5 Interesting Facts About Blockchain Technology

by hotshed71

Blockchain is the technology that makes Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies very secure. It’s an open-source and distributed database that is stored in nodes or computers within the network. When new transactions or blocks are added to the blockchain, it will automatically update itself. Here are 5 interesting facts about this technology.

1 – It’s Tamper-Proof

Once an entry has been added onto the blockchain, it will be nearly impossible to remove or alter it later. If you want to alter an entry, you’d have to basically alter all the transactions that came after it. Doing this is mathematically impossible, so even genius fraudsters would have to look elsewhere to steal bitcoins without too much effort. Being tamper-proof is also the reason bitcoin payments are final and irreversible.

2 – It’s 100% Transparent

Anyone with access to the blockchain can see all the transactions that have ever occurred in the past. You can even look up the first ever block (block 0) that was mined by Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2009. This genesis block contained the message “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

3 – Criminals Can’t Hide Behind The Blockchain

If criminals think they can hide behind the relative anonymity that Bitcoin provides, they’re sorely mistaken. Many have tried to evade the long arm of the law by converting their stolen loot to bitcoins and transferring them to different wallets, but with the transparent nature of the blockchain, computer experts can spot and trace all the bitcoin transactions these criminals have ever done.

4 – Blockchain Technology Is Not Limited To Cryptocurrencies

Many different startups have started to experiment with implementing blockchain technology in various industries. Once such example is Ethereum with their smart contracts technology which basically runs on blockchain. Since the blockchain is decentralized, two parties can make transactions between themselves without needing the services of a middleman. This not only saves you money, but it also saves you a lot of time and conflict.

5 – Blockchain Can Still Be Improved

While this technology has definitely improved the lives of many people, it can still be improved. For one, as time passes by, the blockchain will grow to be several hundred gigabytes of data. This will cause a lot of bandwidth and storage problems on personal computers. Let’s hope the brightest minds in the crypto space can find a solution to this predicament soon.

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