What is Cryptocurrency?
A cryptocurrency is a tradable digital asset or digital form of money, built on blockchain technology that only exists online.
The crypto part in the name “cryptocurrency” comes from the fact that transactions of transferring currency between a sender and a recipient are encrypted by a process called “cryptography”.
The system of cryptocurrency works by logging transactions into a database to work out how much of that currency each individual, or their address, is holding.
Cryptocurrency is decentralized and independent from central authority. When you spend a cryptocurrency, the approval of the transaction does not come from one central authority, like a bank or government, but rather from a Peer-to-Peer network of computers, coming to a consensus that your transaction is legitimate.
Cryptocurrencies are purely digital, you cannot take out a cryptocurrency in paper or coin or other physical form. No physical exchange takes place.
When using cryptocurrency, you are given a public key and a private key, which both appear as string of random numbers and letters.
Bitcoin is generally recognized as the first and most widely used cryptocurrency. Apart from bitcoin, there are more than 4000 altcoins (alternative variant of bitcoin) in the cryptocurrency market.
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