A Brief Overview of The Most Popular Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin (BTC):

Market Cap: $173,770,261,894
Circulating Supply: 16,887,787 BTC
Total Supply: 21,000,000 BTC

Bitcoin is the purest example of a cryptocurrency. It is a digital currency that you can use both as a store of value and as a means of exchange. You can use your Bitcoin when booking flights on Expedia or you could leave your Bitcoin’s stored securely in a wallet and use them at will. No corporation, no hacker and no government can seize them from you if you store them correctly; this makes Bitcoin an efficient store of value. The greatest problem that Bitcoin faces today is scalability. Its network cannot handle the volume it is undergoing; understandably, the latter stages of 2017 saw Bitcoin go mainstream after soaring from $3k to almost $20k in just three months.

Ethereum (ETH):

Market Cap: $84,000
Circulating Supply: 97,859,735 ETH
Total Supply: No Fixed Cap. Unlimited ETHs.

The Ethereum network differs greatly from the Bitcoin network as it serves as a platform to build decentralised applications on, in conjunction with smart contracts. One can build all sorts of applications on the ETH platform ranging from games like CryptoKitties to other cryptocurrencies. Ever heard of EOS, ICON or VeChain? These are cryptocurrency tokens created on the Ethereum platform. ETH is simply the currency that is paid to run these computations. It is not meant as a store of value or any other category of asset.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH):

Market Cap: $21,229,591,117
Circulating Supply: 16,988,838 BCH
Total Supply: 21,000,000 (same as BTC)

Bitcoin Cash is one of the many forks of Bitcoin. A fork is a new creation of a coin (in this instance BCH) that seperates itself from BTC as the developers are unhappy with a certain aspect of the original coin and want to improve upon it. In the case for BCH, people from the Bitcoin Core like Roger Ver, believed that Bitcoin could be improved if its block sizes were increased, allowing for more transactions per second. As you may have seen, total supply for BCH equals that of BTC. When BCH was created, those who held BTC in their wallets, were given an equal amount of BCH. Whether BCH does more harm than good is a huge topic of debate within the cryptocurrency world, so if you’re interested, I can leave some links below.

Litecoin (LTC):

Market Cap: $21,229,591,117
Circulating Supply: 55,391,333 LTC
Total Supply: 84,000,000

Litecoin is extremely similar to Bitcoin when comparing their vision and utility. It was built just two years after Bitcoin for sole the purpose of being an improved version. It is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. The blocks are mined roughly every 150 seconds, meaning that it can handle higher volume levels and complete transactions faster. In contrast, Bitcoin’s blocks are mined every 10 minutes; meaning transactions take longer to validate. In recent months, Litecoin’s value has been put in jeopardy as Bitcoin aims to introduce the lightning network later this year; solving scalability and transaction speed issues. Will the lightning network make Litecoin obsolete? It’s a very subjective matter and only time will tell.

IOTA (MIOTA):

Market Cap: $5,144,799,373
Circulating Supply: 2,779,530,283 MIOTA
Total Supply: 2,779,530,283 MIOTA (not mineable)

Whilst IOTA is not the most popular of cryptocurrencies, it remains to be one of the most interesting ones as it is the first to implement tangle technology as opposed to blockchain technology that most cryptocurrencies run on. Instead of the new blocks linking onto the previously mined one (hence block-chain), with the Tangle, every time you make a transaction, you are verifying two other ones. Therefore, each user is considered a miner. With Bitcoin, you have to invest thousands and at times millions, for mining to be profitable. Another huge benefit of using IOTA is that there are 0 monetary fees when completing a transaction. However, the security of the network is directly proportional to the amount of PoW done per second. Thus each transaction does pay a fee, in the form of proof of work.

Monero (XMR):

Market Cap: $4,617,295,109
Circulating Supply: 15,765,628 XMR
Total Supply: No Fixed Cap

Monero is very similar to Litecoin and Bitcoin; but instead, it focuses on privacy. Whilst Bitcoin and Litecoin boast to have anonymous transactions, that isn’t entirely true.An individual can spend Bitcoin without using their name but their transactions can be connected to the addresses. If those addresses are ever tied to their personal identity, all the transactions associated with them will be tied to their identity as well as the Blockchain keeps a permanent record of every transaction carried out. Monero, however, takes things a step further and fully anonymises transactions; hence why it has been used in the black market. Monero’s main feature is their stealth addresses. When you give your Monero wallet address to someone in order for them to send money to you, no one else can know how many or if any payments at all have been sent to you. If someone sends money to you twice, no one can even tell that two payments were sent to the same person. We will soon be writing a whole blog post dedicated to Monero so if this interests you, scroll up, click follow and you'll be notified when we post it.

Useful Links:

Tangle vs Blockchain by Julian Hosp:

BTC vs BCH: https://www.bitcoin.com/info/bitcoin-cash-compared-to-bitcoin-core

Coinbase’s announcement regarding BCH: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/2911542-bitcoin-cash-faq

G Eazy, Mariah Carey and more accept Monero: https://www.coindesk.com/now-can-buy-mariah-carey-g-eazy-albums-monero/

REMEMBER, IF YOU BUY CHEAP AND SELL HIGH, YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT!

Disclaimer: This article expresses our personal opinions, predictions, and market speculations based on the way we interpret the information we have available to us. It is by no means to be considered expert advice. We take no responsibility/ liability for any actions taken by you based on anything we have mentioned.

We are in no way affiliated with any companies, sites, crypto-currency exchanges and crypto-currencies that we mention in these articles, these are simply the ones we choose to use due to our personal preference.