What are Cryptocurrencies?

Cryptocurrencies are a type of digital currency that allows you to buy goods and services or that you can use as a form of investment.

A specific feature of cryptocurrencies is that they are generally not issued by any centralized authority.

As such, they are considered by many investors to be immune to attempts at manipulation or government intervention.

Cryptocurrencies use state-of-the-art technology called blockchain.

There is a lot to talk about on this topic, but in short, blockchain is a technology that, today, is almost impossible to break and/or falsify transactions in the blockchain.

Through this blockchain, cryptocurrency transactions are divided into many small pieces, which are stored and managed by a group of computers.

Thus, for someone to decode the code of a cryptocurrency, they should have access to all the computers that store these small pieces, which is almost impossible, at least for now.

Short history

Not many people know this, but the history of crypto begins in 1983, when a cryptographer named David Chaum developed the idea of ​​using a cryptographic system to conduct economic transactions.

The term cryptocurrency was first used by Wei Dai in 1998, who thought of using such an instrument as a decentralized payment method.

The first cryptocurrency launched was Bitcoin, a digital currency that is still the most popular in the world (see table below).

Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by an unknown person who goes by the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto”.

What motivated Nakamoto was the economic crisis of 2008, in which millions of people were affected.

He came up with the brilliant idea of ​​creating a payment method that is not tied to any government and thus is not affected by political events.