Ever heard of Bitcoin?
It's a digital asset, designed to work as a medium of exchange. Right from the get-go, fiat currencies were never going to stay for the long run. It took mankind centuries to get to where we are right now, and since debt accumulation began from WW1, it's only gotten worse in the last century.
Before crypto, digital currencies existed. But they were centralized. Crypto came in without a central governance system, i.e. they are decentralized- all of them, Bitcoin, Etherium, Litecoin, Brave Attention Token, Zilliqa...you name it. It's powered by the people, and it's free. This gives it volatility but it also gives the people freedom and independence.
Satoshi Nakamato is the man behind cryptocurrencies. He aimed to create a peer-to-peer digital payments system that had no centralised authority. In 2008, he invented Bitcoin, the first decentralised payments system. It's value skyrocketed to $27 for 1 Bitcoin (BTC) within a year. Thirteen years later, in January 2021, Bitcoin's value exploded to $40,000 and continued to grow to above $50,000 in the following days and weeks.
Ethereum then followed in 2014, created by Vitalik Buterin, and is, in most people's eyes, of more value than Bitcoin because of the services it offers. Ethereum itself is a blockchain that features smart contracts, which essentially means you can write code that automatically makes transactions and records events if certain conditions are met. Having personally learnt about blockchain more clearly in my Design Thinking module at WBS, I've become a lot more interested in programming. Incidentally, I'm also learning Python at the moment, so this should be a fun journey. Back to Ethereum: Its cryptocurrency token is Ether (ETH) and because of the wide variety of services available on the Ethereum network, it's the most actively used blockchain... and also one of (if not, the) most expensive network to trade on.
So: are you curious?
