Description

Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network. Although other cryptocurrencies have come before, Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency - Its reputation has spawned copies and evolution in the space.

With the largest variety of markets and the biggest value - having reached a peak of 18 billion USD - Bitcoin is here to stay. As with any new invention, there can be improvements or flaws in the initial model however the community and a team of dedicated developers are pushing to overcome any obstacle they come across. It is also the most traded cryptocurrency and one of the main entry points for all the other cryptocurrencies. The price is as unstable as always and it can go up or down by 10%-20% in a single day.

Bitcoin is an SHA-256 POW coin with 21,000,000 total minable coins. The block time is 10 minutes. See below for a full range of Bitcoin markets where you can trade US Dollars for Bitcoin, crypto to Bitcoin and many other fiat currencies too.

Learn about the history of Bitcoin here and check out 50 crazy-fun facts about Bitcoin here!

Features

Mobile payments made easy Bitcoin on mobiles allows you to pay with a simple two step scan-and-pay. No need to sign up, swipe your card, type a PIN, or sign anything. All you need to receive Bitcoin payments is to display the QR code in your Bitcoin wallet app and let your friend scan your mobile, or touch the two phones together (using NFC radio technology).

Security and control over your money Bitcoin transactions are secured by military grade cryptography. Nobody can charge you money or make a payment on your behalf. So long as you take the required steps to protect your wallet, Bitcoin can give you control over your money and a strong level of protection against many types of fraud.

Works everywhere, anytime Just like with email, you don't need to ask your family to use the same software or the same service providers. Just let them stick to their own favorites. No problem there; they are all compatible as they use the same open technology. The Bitcoin network never sleeps, even on holidays!

Fast international payments Sending bitcoins across borders is as easy as sending them across the street. There are no banks to make you wait three business days, no extra fees for making an international transfer, and no special limitations on the minimum or maximum amount you can send.

Choose your own fees There is no fee to receive bitcoins, and many wallets let you control how large a fee to pay when spending. Most wallets have reasonable default fees, and higher fees can encourage faster confirmation of your transactions. Fees are unrelated to the amount transferred, so it's possible to send 100,000 bitcoins for the same fee it costs to send 1 bitcoin.

Protect your identity With Bitcoin, there is no credit card number that some malicious actor can collect in order to impersonate you. In fact, it is even possible to send a payment without revealing your identity, almost just like with physical money. You should however take note that some effort can be required to protect your privacy.

Technology

Balances - block chain The block chain is a shared public ledger on which the entire Bitcoin network relies. All confirmed transactions are included in the block chain. This way, Bitcoin wallets can calculate their spendable balance and new transactions can be verified to be spending bitcoins that are actually owned by the spender. The integrity and the chronological order of the block chain are enforced with cryptography.

Transactions - private keys A transaction is a transfer of value between Bitcoin wallets that gets included in the block chain. Bitcoin wallets keep a secret piece of data called a private key or seed, which is used to sign transactions, providing a mathematical proof that they have come from the owner of the wallet. The signature also prevents the transaction from being altered by anybody once it has been issued. All transactions are broadcast between users and usually begin to be confirmed by the network in the following 10 minutes, through a process called mining.

Processing - mining Mining is a distributed consensus system that is used to confirm waiting transactions by including them in the block chain. It enforces a chronological order in the block chain, protects the neutrality of the network, and allows different computers to agree on the state of the system. To be confirmed, transactions must be packed in a block that fits very strict cryptographic rules that will be verified by the network. These rules prevent previous blocks from being modified because doing so would invalidate all following blocks. Mining also creates the equivalent of a competitive lottery that prevents any individual from easily adding new blocks consecutively in the block chain. This way, no individuals can control what is included in the block chain or replace parts of the block chain to roll back their own spends.

Description

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. In the Ethereum protocol and blockchain there is a price for each operation. The general idea is, in order to have things transferred or executed by the network, you have to consume or burn Gas. The cryptocurrency is called Ether and is used to pay for computation time and for transaction fees.

If you want to earn block rewards from the network, you can join the network as a miner. Follow the link for a guide on how to mine Ethereum on a Windows Pc. The much easier but a bit more expensive way is to buy an Ethereum mining contract.

Ethereum is how the Internet was supposed to work. As long as you have enough funds to pay for your code to be run by the network, your contacts will always be up and running.

It was crowdfunded during August 2014 by fans all around the world. It is developed and maintained by ETHDEV with contributions from great minds across the globe. There is also an Ethereum foundation and there are multiple startups working with the Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum is currently on the "Homestead" stage and all its related software is still considered Beta until the release of the next stage "Metropolis".

If you are looking for a GUI interface for your wallet, try the Ethereum Wallet DApp. It's still in beta so be careful when you use it.

Our block explorer data bellow is freely provided by etherchain.org and etherscan.io.

Features

Ethereum is a platform that is intended to allow people to easily write decentralized applications (Đapps) using blockchain technology. A decentralized application is an application which serves some specific purpose to its users, but which has the important property that the application itself does not depend on any specific party existing. Rather than serving as a front-end for selling or providing a specific party's services, a Đapp is a tool for people and organizations on different sides of an interaction use to come together without any centralized intermediary.

Contracts generally serve four purposes:

- Maintain a data store representing something which is useful to either other contracts or to the outside world; one example of this is a contract that simulates a currency, and another is a contract that records membership in a particular organization.

- Serve as a sort of externally owned account with a more complicated access policy; this is called a "forwarding contract" and typically involves simply resending incoming messages to some desired destination only if certain conditions are met; for example, one can have a forwarding contract that waits until two out of a given three private keys have confirmed a particular message before resending it (ie. multisig). More complex forwarding contracts have different conditions based on the nature of the message sent; the simplest use case for this functionality is a withdrawal limit that is overrideable via some more complicated access procedure.

- Manage an ongoing contract or relationship between multiple users. Examples of this include a financial contract, an escrow with some particular set of mediators, or some kind of insurance. One can also have an open contract that one party leaves open for any other party to engage with at any time; one example of this is a contract that automatically pays a bounty to whoever submits a valid solution to some mathematical problem, or proves that it is providing some computational resource.

- Provide functions to other contracts; essentially serving as a software library.

Contracts interact with each other through an activity that is alternately called either "calling" or "sending messages". A "message" is an object containing some quantity of ether (a special internal currency used in Ethereum with the primary purpose of paying transaction fees), a byte-array of data of any size, the addresses of a sender and a recipient. When a contract receives a message it has the option of returning some data, which the original sender of the message can then immediately use. In this way, sending a message is exactly like calling a function.

Technology

Sandwich complexity model: the bottom level architecture of Ethereum should be as simple as possible, and the interfaces to Ethereum (including high level programming languages for developers and the user interface for users) should be as easy to understand as possible. Where complexity is inevitable, it should be pushed into the "middle layers" of the protocol, that are not part of the core consensus but are also not seen by end users - high-level-language compilers, argument serialization and deserialization scripts, storage data structure models, the leveldb storage interface and the wire protocol, etc. However, this preference is not absolute.

Freedom: users should not be restricted in what they use the Ethereum protocol for, and we should not attempt to preferentially favor or disfavor certain kinds of Ethereum contracts or transactions based on the nature of their purpose. This is similar to the guiding principle behind the concept of "net neutrality". One example of this principle not being followed is the situation in the Bitcoin transaction protocol where use of the blockchain for "off-label" purposes (eg. data storage, meta-protocols) is discouraged, and in some cases explicit quasi-protocol changes (eg. OP_RETURN restriction to 40 bytes) are made to attempt to attack applications using the blockchain in "unauthorized" ways. In Ethereum, we instead strongly favor the approach of setting up transaction fees in such a way as to be roughly incentive-compatible, such that users that use the blockchain in bloat-producing ways internalize the cost of their activities (ie. Pigovian taxation).

Generalization: protocol features and opcodes in Ethereum should embody maximally low-level concepts, so that they can be combined in arbitrary ways including ways that may not seem useful today but which may become useful later, and so that a bundle of low-level concepts can be made more efficient by stripping out some of its functionality when it is not necessary. An example of this principle being followed is our choice of a LOG opcode as a way of feeding information to (particularly light client) dapps, as opposed to simply logging all transactions and messages as was internally suggested earlier - the concept of "message" is really the agglomeration of multiple concepts, including "function call" and "event interesting to outside watchers", and it is worth separating the two.

Have No Features: as a corollary to generalization, the dev team often refuses to build in even very common high-level use cases as intrinsic parts of the protocol, with the understanding that if people really want to do it they can always create a sub-protocol (eg. ether-backed subcurrency, bitcoin/litecoin/dogecoin sidechain, etc) inside of a contract. An example of this is the lack of a Bitcoin-like "locktime" feature in Ethereum, as such a feature can be simulated via a protocol where users send "signed data packets" and those data packets can be fed into a specialized contract that processes them and performs some corresponding function if the data packet is in some contract-specific sense valid.

Non-risk-aversion: the dev team is okay with higher degrees of risk if a risk-increasing change provides very substantial benefits (eg. generalized state transitions, 50x faster block times, consensus efficiency, etc)

Description

Litecoin LTC - provides faster transaction confirmations (2.5 minutes on average) and uses a memory-hard, scrypt-based mining proof-of-work algorithm to target the regular computers and GPUs most people already have - which are its main differentials to Bitcoin. The Litecoin network is scheduled to produce 84 million currency units with a halving in reward every four years just like bitcoin. The coin was created by a Google employee, Charles Lee. Litecoin is in second spot to Bitcoin and has spawned numerous clones - however it has a solid base of support and dedicated development team.

The Litecoin project is currently maintained by a core group of 6 software developers, led by Charles Lee, with a large community that is growing in support.

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the Top 5 (By Market Cap) cryptocurrencies to implement the SegWit scaling solution. Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco in under one second.

Features

Litecoin is an open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license which gives you the power to run, modify, and copy the software and to distribute, at your option, modified copies of the software. The software is released in a transparent process that allows for independent verification of binaries and their corresponding source code.

Miners are currently awarded with 25 new litecoins per block, an amount which gets halved roughly every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks). The Litecoin network is therefore scheduled to produce 84 million litecoins, which is 4 times as many currency units as Bitcoin.

The Litecoin blockchain is capable of handling higher transaction volume than its counterpart - Bitcoin. Due to more frequent block generation, the network supports more transactions without a need to modify the software in the future. As a result, merchants get faster confirmation times, while still having ability to wait for more confirmations when selling bigger ticket items.

Technology

- Faster transaction confirmations (2.5 minutes on average)

- Scrypt-based mining proof-of-work algorithm

- 84 million litecoins

- Higher transaction volume than Bitcoin

- MIT/X11 license

Description

DigitalCash (DASH) uses a new chained hashing algorithm approach, with many new scientific hashing algorithms for the proof-of-work. DASH aims to be the first privacy-centric cryptographic currency with fully encrypted transactions and anonymous block transactions, this feature is called PrivateSend and can be found on the official Dashcore wallet.

PrivateSend mixes your DASH coins with other users who are also using this feature at the time, making your transactions untraceable.

Users can also earn DigitalCash rewards by hosting a master node to help maintain the Blockchain. One must have a balance of at least 1000 DASH in order to host a Dash master node, this collateral is required to avoid 51% attacks on the network.

Features

• Untraceable payments
• Unlinkable transactions
• Double-spending proof
• Blockchain analysis resistance
• Egalitarian proof of work
• Adaptive limits

Technology

• Difficulty retargets each block
• Block reward decreases each block according to the formula:
  BaseReward = (MSupply - A)/218, where MSupply = (264 - 1) atomic units and 'A' is amount of already generated coins
• POW mechanism is a voting system for users

Description

Monero (XMR) is a cryptonight algorithm based alternative crypto currency. The coin is based on Proof of Work and has a block reward that varies smoothly. The difficulty retargets every block with a sixty second block target.

Monero uses a Ring Signature system to protect your privacy, allowing users to make untraceable transactions.

Features

• Privacy (Untraceable payments, Unlinkable transactions)
  Monero daemon uses the original CryptoNote protocol except for the initial changes (as the block time and emission speed). The protocol itself is based on ring signatures (Daniel J. Bernstein's Curve25519 + Ed25519, Schnorr signatures on a Twisted Edwards curve) and stealth addresses. The end result is passive, decentralised mixing based on heavily-tested algorithms.
• Decentralisation
  The smart mining[20] forthcoming feature will allow transparent CPU mining on the user's computer, far from the de facto centralization of mining farms and pool mining, pursuing Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision of a true p2p currency.
  
• Scalability
  Monero has no hardcoded limit, which means it doesn't have a 1 MB block size limitation preventing scalability.

Technology

Ring Signature

The Basics

In cryptography, a ring signature is a type of digital signature that can be performed by any member of a group of users that each have keys. Therefore, a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular group of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the group members' keys was used to produce the signature.

For instance, a ring signature could be used to provide an anonymous signature from "a high-ranking White House official", without revealing which official signed the message. Ring signatures are right for this application because the anonymity of a ring signature cannot be revoked, and because the group for a ring signature can be improvised (requires no prior setup).

Application to Monero

A ring signature makes use of your account keys and a number of public keys (also known as outputs) pulled from the blockchain using a triangular distribution method. Over the course of time, past outputs could be used multiple times to form possible signer participants. In a "ring" of possible signers, all ring members are equal and valid. There is no way an outside observer can tell which of the possible signers in a signature group belongs to your account. So, ring signatures ensure that transaction outputs are untraceable. Moreover, there are no fungibility issues with Monero given that every transaction output has plausible deniability (e.g. the network can not tell which outputs are spent or unspent).

To read how Monero gives you privacy by default (unlinkability), see stealth addresses.

Description

Nxt is considered a 2nd generation crypto currency. With all the alt coins that alter parametes such as hashing mechanism, time between blocks, starting difficulty, and so on, Nxt brings much much more to the table and was designed this way for a number of reasons. It's proof of stake model makes it less susceptible to 51% attacks whilst it is designed to support large transaction volumes, something which the traditional Bitcoin and its clones have as a potential flaw. Nxt allows the creation and exchange of custom tokens, coloured coins and assets on the Blockchain.

In 2016, the NXT team announced the launch of Ardor, the Nxt 2.0. The platform will allow users the same features as Nxt and additional tools like sidechain support for asset issuance and more. The destribution of the ARDR token was done through a snapshot process, which is the reason for the price spike during late 2016.

Description

Ethereum Classic is an attempt at keeping the Ethereum blockchain unaltered by the part of the community that opposed the hard fork and the return of The DAO funds. It started trading on Poloniex and is getting more and more traction.

The Ethereum Classic mission statement is:

"We believe in decentralized, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchains. We believe in the original vision of Ethereum as a world computer you can't shut down, running irreversible smart contracts. We believe in a strong separation of concerns, where system forks are only possible in order to correct actual platform bugs, not to bail out failed contracts and special interests. We believe in censorship-resistant platform that can be actually trusted - by anyone."

Our block explorer data: total coins supply, total network hash rate, last block number and total difficulty are freely provided by https://gastracker.io/

In 2017, the Die Hard fork was implemented in ETC, removing the Ethereum difficulty bomb. Currently, there are no plans to move to Proof of Stake like Ethereum, although developers at the IOHK institute are developing a new PoS protocol for Ethereum Classic.

Description

A Bitcoin clone that has reached success through clever marketing. Over the past year well over a hundred new cryptocurrencies have been created but not many have instantly carved out a niche. Dogecoin has sponsored multiple high profile events such as Nascar teams and the winter olympics - even so there are few locations to use the coin - and instead it has become a de facto internet tipping currency. The coin has produced 100 billion units by the end of 2014 and is now producing roughly 5 billion units per year.

Description

ZCash is a privacy driven cryptocurrency. It uses the Equihash as an algorithm, which is an asymmetric memory-hard Proof of Work algorithm based on the generalized birthday problem. It relies on high RAM requirements to bottleneck the generation of proofs and making ASIC development unfeasible.

ZCash uses zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) to ensure that all information (sender, reciever, ammount) is encrypted, without the possibility of double-spending. The only information that is revealed regarding transactions is the time in which they take place.

Block explorer data from https://explorer.zcha.in/

Features

Privacy Enhanced

A decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that provides strong privacy protections. If Bitcoin is like http for money, Zcash is https—a secure transport layer.

Technology

zk-SNARKs

The Basic

Zcash is the first widespread application of zk-SNARKs, a novel form of zero-knowledge cryptography. The strong privacy guarantee of Zcash is derived from the fact that shielded transactions in Zcash can be fully encrypted on the blockchain, yet still be verified as valid under the network’s consensus rules by using zk-SNARK proofs.

The acronym zk-SNARK stands for “Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge,” and refers to a proof construction where one can prove possession of certain information, e.g. a secret key, without revealing that information, and without any interaction between the prover and verifier.

“Zero-knowledge” proofs allow one party (the prover) to prove to another (the verifier) that a statement is true, without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself. For example, given the hash of a random number, the prover could convince the verifier that there indeed exists a number with this hash value, without revealing what it is.

Application to ZCASH

In order to have zero-knowledge privacy in Zcash, the function determining the validity of a transaction according to the network’s consensus rules must return the answer of whether the transaction is valid or not, without revealing any of the information it performed the calculations on. This is done by encoding some of the network's consensus rules in zk-SNARKs. At a high level, zk-SNARKs work by first turning what you want to prove into an equivalent form about knowing a solution to some algebraic equations. In the following section, we give a brief overview of how the rules for determining a valid transaction get transformed into equations that can then be evaluated on a candidate solution without revealing any sensitive information to the parties verifying the equations.

Description

BitShares (BTS) was first introduced in a White Paper titled “A Peer-to-Peer Polymorphic Digital Asset Exchange” by Daniel Larimer, Charles Hoskinson, and Stan Larimer. It is a brand of open-source software based on the as blockchain technology as used by Bitcoin. Unlike bitcoins, which do not produce any income for their owners, BitShare can be used to launch Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs) which issue shares, produce profits and distribute profits to shareholders. As such, BitShares is about making profitable companies that people want to own shares in, thus creating return for the shareholders. The first DAC launched by this proces was called BitSharesX, a decentralized asset exchange based in Hong Kong. BitShares was originally launched under the name of ProtoShares (PTS); it was later renamed to BitShares (BTS) and "reloaded" in November 2014 by merging several products into BitShares (BTS).

Features

The BitShares platform itself is run and maintained by the BitShares community–an open consortium of individuals and organizations committed to providing universal access to the power of smart contracts. Working together, this community has designed and developed the BitShares platform to include numerous innovative features which are not found elsewhere within the smart contract industry

• Price-Stable Cryptocurrencies
  SmartCoins provide the freedom of cryptocurrency with the stability of the dollar
• Decentralized Asset Exchange
  A fast and fluid trading platform
  
• Industrial Performance and Scalability
  Over 100,000 transactions per second
• Recurring & Scheduled Payments
  Flexible withdrawal permissions
  
• Referral Rewards Program
  Network growth through adoption rewards
• Dynamic Account Permissions
  Management for the corporate environment
• User-Issued Assets
  Regulation-compatible cryptoasset issuance
• Stakeholder-Approved Project Funding
  A self-sustaining funding model
• Transferable Named Accounts
  Easy and secure transactions
• Delegated Proof-of-Stake Consensus
  A robust and flexible consensus protocol
  

Technology

Delegated Proof-of-Stake Consensus

Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) is a new method of securing a crypto-currency’s network. DPOS attempts to solve the problems of both Bitcoin’s traditional Proof of Work system, and the Proof of Stake system of Peercoin and NXT. DPOS implements a layer of technological democracy to offset the negative effects of centralization.

Delegated proof of stake mitigates the potential negative impacts of centralization through the use of witnesses (formaly called delegates). A total of N witnesses sign the blocks and are voted on by those using the network with every transaction that gets made. By using a decentralized voting process, DPOS is by design more democratic than comparable systems. Rather than eliminating the need for trust all together, DPOS has safeguards in place the ensure that those trusted with signing blocks on behalf of the network are doing so correctly and without bias. Additionally, each block signed must have a verification that the block before it was signed by a trusted node. DPOS eliminates the need to wait until a certain number of untrusted nodes have verified a transaction before it can be confirmed.

This reduced need for confirmation produces an increase in speed of transaction times. By intentionally placing trust with the most trustworthy of potential block signers, as decided by the network, no artificial encumbrance need be imposed to slow down the block signing process. DPOS allows for many more transactions to be included in a block than either proof of work or proof of stake systems. DPOS technology allows cryptocurrency technology to transact at a level where it can compete with the centralized clearinghouses like Visa and Mastercard. Such clearinghouses administer the most popular forms of electronic payment systems in the world.

In a delegated proof of stake system centralization still occurs, but it is controlled. Unlike other methods of securing cryptocurrency networks, every client in a DPOS system has the ability to decide who is trusted rather than trust concentrating in the hands of those with the most resources. DPOS allows the network to reap some of the major advantages of centralization, while still maintaining some calculated measure of decentralization. This system is enforced by a fair election process where anyone could potentially become a delegated representative of the majority of users.

Description

A coin that has adopted the Bitcoin "21" figure but increased the supply to 21 billion - with over 5 algorithms to mine with (Scryt, Sha-256, Qubit, Skein, Groestl) - in order to keep mining local and in the hands of many. A 60 second block target, a 0.5% premine and a block retarget every 2.4 hrs or 244 blocks.

DigiByte: Refers to the entire DigiByte network or a single monetary unit on the payment network. 21 billion DigiBytes will be created over 21 years.

Block: A grouping of all transactions sent over the DigiByte network within a 30 second time frame. Think of a block as an excel spreadsheet that lists the address location of all DigiBytes at a given point in time in history. New DigiBytes are brought into circulation as each block is discovered on the network through a process called mining.

Mining: Mining is how transactions are processed on the network. Anyone can become a miner by donating and using their desktop, laptop or mobile phone computing power to help process transactions on the DigiByte network. DigiByte has made this process even easier with our 3 click mining software for beginners.

Blockchain: The DigiByte blockchain is the entire history of all blocks discovered on the network & therefore all transactions made on the network. Each block references the proceeding block all the way back to the beginning of the network to what is known as the genesis block. By linking blocks (spreadsheets) together an accurate, secure accounting of all up to date DigiByte ownership is made by decentralized consensus.

Features

Absolute Security: Our number one priority will now and forever be network and user security.

Speedy Transactions: We strive to create the fastest possible decentralized transactions.

Worldwide Decentralization: Keep the network open, transparent and accessible at all times.

Ease of Use: Allow anyone to use and benefit from DigiByte in an easy to understand manner.

Flexible Innovation: Quickly improve, adapt and innovate as new technology and threats arise.

Technology

Security: DigiByte uses five highly advanced cryptographic algorithms.

Speed: DigiByte transaction notifications occur in 1-3 seconds, blocks are discovered every thirty seconds and transactions are fully confirmed every 3 minutes. Future planned upgrades will make these times even faster.

Fees: Most DigiByte to DigiByte transactions are free or carry a very small network-mining fee to incentivize people to mine.

Worldwide: DigiBytes are already stored, traded and transacted in over 89 countries.

Decentralization: There is no need for a middleman or third party or central server.

Re-Spend: Send DigiBytes you received to someone else in as little as three minutes.

Finite Production: New DigiBytes are added to the network every thirty seconds through a process called mining as each new block (or grouping of transactions in a spreadsheet like format) is discovered by the network.

Scarcity: 21 Billion DigiBytes will be created in 21 years.

1% Monthly New Minting Reduction: New DigiByte production decreases 1% every month.

Mining: DigiByte mining is decentralized with five independent, highly secure mining algorithms.

Adaptable, innovative & flexible: DigiByte is constantly adding new features & services to remain on the cutting edge of digital currency technology.

Committed Development: DigiByte has been under constant, progressive development for over one year now with core development team members from all over the world.

Millennial Acquisition Potential: DigiByte provides merchants, banks & other legacy institutions with a new means of acquiring & connecting with tech savvy millennial users.

A Bright Future: DigiByte has many new & exciting projects underway to be released throughout 2015 to increase DigiByte utility and new user adoption across the globe.

Description

Ripple positions itself as a complement to, rather than a competitor with, Bitcoin - the site has a page dedicated to Ripple for bitcoiners. Ripple is a distributed network which means transactions occur immediately across the network - and as it is peer to peer - the network is resilient to systemic risk. Ripples aren't mined - unlike bitcoin and its peers - but each transaction destroys a small amount of XRP which adds a deflationary measure into the system. There are 100 billion XRP at present.

Features

• Math-Based Currency
  A math-based currency, also referred to as a cryptocurrency, is a digital asset with verifiable mathematical properties, similar to how we can reliably verify gold as a substance made of atoms with 79 protons. Math-based currencies exist as digital assets in their own right and can be transferred directly between users (as fiat cash can be) without relying on a centralized protocol operator. XRP exists as a math-based currency on the Ripple protocol.
• Abuse Protection
  The primary function of XRP is to protect the Ripple protocol against denial-of-service (DoS) spam attacks. Since the Ripple protocol is based around a shared ledger of accounts, a malicious attacker could create large amounts of “ledger spam” (such as fake accounts) and “transaction spam” (such as fake transactions) in an attempt to overload the protocol. This could cause the size of the ledger to become unmanageable and interfere with the protocol’s ability to quickly settle legitimate transactions.
• Bridge Currency
  XRP has great value as a bridge currency. Because each gateway’s balances trade as distinct assets within Ripple, the number of potential currency pairings can become quite large. Instead of quoting every possible currency/gateway combination, XRP can serve as a useful bridge currency to enable these transfers. This is possible because if every currency is liquid to XRP, then every currency is liquid to every other currency:

Technology

The Ledger and Consensus
The Ripple protocol is, at its core, a shared public database. This database includes a ledger, which serves to track accounts and the balances associated with them. The ledger is a distributed database — a perfect, shared record of accounts, balances, and transactions in the Ripple protocol. It is continually and automatically updated by the Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) so that an identical ledger exists on thousands of servers around the world. At any time, anybody can review the ledger and see a record of all activity on the Ripple protocol. When changes are made to the ledger, computers connected to the Ripple protocol will mutually agree to the changes via a process called consensus. The Ripple protocol reaches consensus globally within seconds of a change being made. The consensus finding process is the engineering breakthrough that allows for fast, secure, and decentralized transaction settlement on the Ripple protocol.

The World’s First Distributed Exchange
No one owns or controls the Ripple protocol. It runs on computers around the world, all working together to continually maintain a perfect, shared record of accounts, balances, and transactions. Distributed networks offer many efficiencies over centralized networks. Because the network is “self-clearing”, it eliminates the need for a centralized network operator (and gets rid of the associated layer of fees). Because there is no single point of failure, distributed networks are more reliable. They also tend to be more secure, due to their open source nature.