Page 18 - Evolve Spring 2021 Magazine

Is Cryptocurrency the future?
Throughout the past year we’ve seen an immense rise in cryptocurrency transactions - be it blue collar workers getting lucky with their purchase of 100 bitcoin back in 2015 and holding it to point of affording private jets, or massive businesses buying $1.5 Billion worth of it. It has all happened with crypto, more importantly bitcoin.
So what is cryptocurrency? Well... cryptocurrency is
in its simplest form a digitilised cash. The name cryptocurrency is the use of portmanteau, consisting of two words: cryptography and currency. Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques (such as: codes and ciphers), for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. The earliest recorded use of this has been by the ‘Old Kingdom of Egypt’, circa 1900 BC, with the intent of enticing intrigue and mystery. Currency in its traditional sense is a form of medium used for the exchange of goods and services.
“peer-to-peer” operation comes to play, the blockchain is built upon transactions between users. The way
it works is: A new transaction enters circulation, the transaction is then transmitted to the network of users, this network then solves equations in order to confirm the validity of the pending transaction (also known as mining). After the transaction has been validated, these blocks, (the transaction), are chained together to create a permanent history of all transactions - as the name “blockchain” specifies.
As we all know, for a currency to truly be successful it needs to be trusted. So how did bitcoin entice the masses? Well, I believe the idea that anyone can “mine” it and is completely decentralised made it for what it is now. The fact that at the very beginning of bitcoin, one with a pen and paper could work out the equation and bring a bitcoin in circulation, was indeed very enticing
to early adopters,
granted this was back
in 2009 when a bitcoin wasn’t worth more than $0.0010. This was also the case based on the supply of bitcoin, as the more bitcoins were brought into circulation, the harder that “validity” equation is. As of the time of writing this, there are 18 million in circulation, with a total supply of 21 million. This means that at rate users are mining them, by the end of 2021 or beginning of 2022 all bitcoins would’ve been mined.
So back to the original question... Is cryptocurrency the future?
While we’ve seen just how high and volatile the market can get, I do not think bitcoin as we know it will ever
be able to replace the traditional currencies (Dollars, Pounds), it’s very feasible to see it become the ‘new gold’. This is in the sense that people will use it to show the rate of inflation on our traditional currencies and with some people, to use it for obscure payments. But no more than that, many don’t want to put trust in such a sporadic form of currency and make it their primary currency.
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Cryptocurrency creates this bond of secure communications and the exchanging of services in almost perfect harmony... especially Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been the most popular out of the ‘bunch’ and had an extreme resurgence in the past few months. To understand why Bitcoin has become so valuable and has created such a larger disparity between other cryptocurrencies, (the second largest cryptocurrency
is Ethereum, which at this point in time is around 25% the market capital of bitcoin), we need to understand Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a ledger based peer-to-peer decentralised digital currency that practically is a
‘digital cash’. The ledger, known as a blockchain consists of all confirmed transactions. This is where the