Top 5 cryptocurrencies you should know
Bitcoin is close to reach its highest value ever — $1,216. A few weeks earlier, it was down to $800 mostly due to the Chinese government investigating ‘cryptocurrency activities” in the country. With such a controlled Chinese Yuan, lots of Chinese people are increasingly looking for ways to move their money freely and out of the country. And a growing number of people are turning to cryptocurrency for that purpose: to protect, to move and to use their money as they please.
As bitcoin has been the pioneering cryptocurrency — the first leveraging the blockchain technology, allowing cheaper, safer and faster transactions — people associate naturally the words cryptocurrency and bitcoin. However, Bitcoin has inspired lots of geek entrepreneurs to come up with a better version of Bitcoin. Some kind of bitcoin 2.0. And that’s because Bitcoin isn’t perfect. It has some major room for improvements. For example, Bitcoin network requires lots of energy (computing power & electricity) to run its network to verify transactions. It’s quite inefficient and it’s raising lots of questions on the future of the pioneering cryptocurrency. Welcome to the world of the Altcoins.
Think of it this way. A cryptocurrency is like an social network. You basically only need one that most people will use. MySpace was the first dominant and successful social network in 2003–2006 — In fact, it was the #1 website in number of visitors in the US in 2006, beating both Google and Yahoo! Facebook came along and wiped out MySpace in less than a year. Will this happen to Bitcoin? Maybe. Time will tell.
Let’s have a quick look at some of the fastest-growing cryptocurrencies competing for maybe, the crown spot in the coming months or years.
1- LiteCoin (LTC) — current price: 3.8$
Created in 2011 by Charles Lee, a former Google Employee, Litecoin was meant to become the “silver” of Bitcoin’s Gold. The main difference is that litecoin can confirm transactions must faster than bitcoin. The implications are that Litecoin can handle a higher volume of transactions. In other words, a merchant who waited for a minimum of two confirmations would only need to wait five minutes, whereas they would have to wait 10 minutes for just one confirmation with bitcoin. One must know that cryptocurrency transactions are instant — but the transaction is ‘sealed’ into the blockchain every 2.5 minutes for Litecoin and 10 minutes for BitCoin.
Overall, Litecoin is a stable and well-designed currency, but it lacks an engaged and strong community behind it that have characterized a newer breed of cryptocurrencies. I consider it to be risky investment, even if its core design principles are economically sound. It had a window of opportunity to be a dominant player but it has missed it.
Source: https://poloniex.com/exchange#usdt_ltc
2- Ripple XRP — Current Price $0.005819
Ripple has two different separable components: One is a payment network . Another is the native currency on the payment network. Both are called Ripple, thus causing a lot of confusion. I’ll call the payment network Ripple and the currency XRP.
So XRP is a pre-mined centralized currency running on the Ripple. In fact, you can use any FIAT currencies (ie. Euro, USD, etc…) on Ripple. Using EURO on a decentralized payment network doesn’t make Euro decentralized. EURO is still controlled by the European Central bank. This is important to note. XRP is controlled by RippleLabs. Like a central bank enacting monetary policy to control the supply of money, RippleLabs is in total control of the supply of XRP, because they alone hold 70%+ of all the coins.
The rate at which they distribute coins into the system influences the exchange rate. They have motives to promote Ripple, and increase the market cap. So they have been distributing XRP in such a way that the exchange rate is increased to an acceptable level which gives the impression that XRP is valuable and attractive to hold. Hence the market cap booms in a relatively short amount of time.
XRP is inherently centralized. If the European Central Bank seizes RippleLabs and takes over the XRP reserve, they can control the value of XRP like RippleLabs does.
Ripple has already gained a significant following. It has the second highest market capitalization of any cryptocurrency, and its value seems to be increasing. Because of its design, Ripple will never completely replace analog currencies, but the payment network that supports it has the potential to change the way business is done globally: Ripple has shifted its focus on the payment network (settlement network as they call it), offering its technologies to banks for making faster and cheaper international payments.
3- Ether (From Ethereum)
Similar to Ripple, Ether is the “fuel” needed in distributed processing power for its network called Ethereum to run. If bitcoin envisioned how a distributed group of users could create and manage a currency, ethereum sought to allow a distributed group of users to create and manage a decentralized, un-censorable app store. Bitcoin has only one purpose, to be a digital value carrier. Ethereum is a platform that has the ability to create and run applications on it.
Because of its wide mission and the attention of the media towards this particular network/cryptocurrency, its value has seen an strong increase from December 2015 onwards. Ether price will mostly depend on whether its network delivers on its promise to become internet 2.0 (with startups taking on companies like Airbnb or Uber with a new approach: instant, secured and fully automated transactions, with no middleman taking on fees).
4- Dash (DASH)- a privacy-centric cryptocurrency
The currency incorporates several key innovations, some aimed towards increasing anonymity and others simply to improve the functioning of the system. Its core purpose is to act as electronic cash, providing a level of anonymity unheard of among cryptocurrencies. Evan Duffield, one of the creator, is still actively developing Dash. Dash is not yet widely accepted by retailers, but a fair selection of independent businesses accept it. The price went from 2.5$ in early December 2016 to $23 today (February 2017) and is now one of the highest valued currencies on the market.
Dash’s key innovation is its ability to make its transactions untraceable. Specially designated computers collect and execute several transactions at once, making it unclear whose coins are going to who, like a massive electronic game of three-card monte. To increase anonymity, users can opt for multiple rounds of mixing to further obfuscate the source of their coins.
This system also means that there is no publicly available ledger as there is with other coins, making it difficult for third parties to analyze your transactions and calculate your holdings.
Dash is the most privacy-conscious cryptocurrency available today — with the most momentum (price-wise, and trading volume confirming the trend) among all.
5- Monero (XMR)
Once called “CryptoNote”, as they are putting it in their ‘white paper’ published in October 2013, Monero was built on the Bitcoin’s flaws — in their terms: Untraceability and Unlinkability. Monero has truly started to ‘fly’ on May 2017. Monero’s privacy is definitely something that appeals to a huge crowd but governments aren’t naturally too happy unanimity. Researchers from the central bank of Canada are of the opinion that private digital currencies will not survive in the future, unless the government gets involved in some way.
Nevertheless, Monero is seeing tremendous momentum among the crypto community with a growing trade volume and price increase in the last 6 months. It’s hard to predict how long this momentum will last, but it worth keeping a look at this cryptocurrency.
My first (Controversial) conclusion: Do not invest in any of these cryptocurrencies unless you’re ready to lose big. The risk is too high, and I do not see why these currencies would actually beat Bitcoin in the long term. They do not have the brand, a large enough community nor the acceptance from merchants compared to Bitcoin.
The world of cryptocurrency is very competitive and it’s going nowhere as it is. With so many cryptocurrencies out there, small communities of geeks are forming, each to protect its own project. There’s almost like a ritual to publish the ‘white paper’ describing in details the reason why this cryptocurrency is better than Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto did it in 2008 and it was revolutionary. He gave the blueprint of a digital payment, solving the ‘double-spend’ problem. But today, all these altcoins are coming out with slightly better version of Bitcoin. They truly are technically better — some run a much more sustainable blockchain (less electricity needed), some will better protect privacy, some will provide a better & faster user experience at the counter. But usually, you see these coins losing interest to the eyes of the public a few months after their introduction, simply because they do not have users (but only miners)
There’s a new breed of cryptocurrency that took a completely different angle. But this angle is very controversial. Why? Simply because they are not tech oriented, but network marketing oriented. The geeks are losing power, and they don’t like it. I made a video to explain my views on this.
I won’t call OneCoin a cryptocurrency, yet. But IF it releases its blockchain to the public on April 2018 as its CEO Dr. Ruja Ignatova announced few months ago, it might become one of the biggest cryptocurrencies in terms of coins holders, acceptance with merchants and market cap. Here’s my few words on OneCoin:
OneCoin (ONE)
This is by far the most controversial ‘cryptocurrency’ and has been (for long) wrongfully accused of being a scam — mostly by handful of people who never even tried to look beyond the login page — The irony is that Bitcoin has suffered an even more violent bashing in the early days by the media — and part of its community imposed the same to its probably closest competitor to date. So I expect to have a few harsh comments by mentioning OneCoin in this article, by some of the haters who actually do not know what OneCoin is trying to achieve. There’s obviously no guarantee that they will pull this out but so far, their growth has been impressive. Almost 3 million people so far have signed up and bought an education package on cryptocurrency, giving them access to the ‘mining pool’. Using network marketing as distribution method, there’s now a real incentive on spreading the word about this new form of payment. And it works. Register here (disclosure: my affiliation link)
Thousands of people everyday gather in meeting rooms or at cafés, whether it’s in Bangkok, London or Mumbai, to be introduced to cryptocurrency. All kind of people join in. And let’s be honest, most of them still do not understand how a blockchain works or what “hash rate’ means.
They recently launched Dealshaker, a site featuring over 11,000 merchants accepting ONE as payment. There’s an offer for a condo in the Philippines for 64,000 ONE!!! You might not like the website (quality control needs to improve when it comes to pictures for example), but you have to admit that it’s rare to see a cryptocurrency that you can actually use to buy things.
Most people I meet at OneCoin are not tech-savvy, that’s for sure. And most of them are here for the money — commissions they are getting each week from bringing in people through the affiliation system. But what’s important, and in my opinion what every other cryptocurrencies failed to do: they all understand that cryptocurrency allows faster, cheaper and safer transactions worldwide — eliminating the middleman in the process, thanks to the blockchain.
