bitcoin

Since the advent of Bitcoin in 2009 there have been hundreds of cryptocurrencies. Many of them are crude copies of Bitcoin but others provide new features that make them unique disruptive technologies in the industry. While the adoption of bitcoin as means of payment online is growing at a moderate pace, investment in cryptocurrency related startups went through the roof. The reach of these technologies is growing exponentially and if we look at Ray Kurzweil’s law of accelerated returns can only hope that this cryptocurrency fever produces a "technological change so rapid and profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history ".  Right now the sensible thing is to be prudent. And my prudence invites me to invest a few euros in each of these cryptocurrencies, just in case. At any time, the final emergence of the cryptocurrencies will happen and the entire planet will begin using them the same way it happened with email, wikipedia or smartphones. Obviously I do not have a crystal ball to predict the future but here I leave my 4 favorites for the second half of 2016. Ethereum Ethereum is a development and distributed computing platform based in blockchain technology.  It was first described by  Vitalik Buterin, one of the developers of Bitcoin, in late 2013 and published in early 2015. Its intention is to decentralize any kind of service and to allow any developer to create intelligent contracts without any possibility of censorship, fraud, falls or third party interference. Smart Ethereum contracts are apps that can be used for almost anything: electronic voting, buying and selling domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, management of companies and organizations, contracts, agreements, intellectual property and etc. Mining works like Bitcoin, so the miners who validate transactions on the network are rewarded with Ether. Ether is the underlying cryptocurrency used to execute Ethereum contracts.   Symbol: ETH Official Website: https://www.ethereum.org/ Price: $ 9.46  Market capitalization: $ 781,906,113 Maidsafe SAFE (Secure Access For Everyone) Network is an open source protocol that aims to create a platform for decentralized internet. It was founded in 2006 by engineer Dave Irvine from Scotland and is still under development. This "massive disk array and secure access internet" works so that each user gives up part of their processing capacity and storage for others to use. Instead of specialized servers, the data is stored and distributed by a network of computers connected to the Internet provided by users of the network. The system manages space allocation and communication between computers for guaranteeing redundancy if a computer goes offline. The network data is encrypted and cryptographically signed so that only the owner can decipher it. Those users who share their computing resources with the network are rewarded with Safecoin, the currency or networktoken of this system.   Symbol: MAID Official Website:  http://maidsafe.net/ Price: $ 0.07  Market capitalization:  $ 31,732,025  Ripple Ripple is a payment system and open source distributed very similar to Bitcoin that allows you to send payments through open and arbitrary trusted networks the same way Internet routes data packs. The system was developed by the company OpenCoin in 2012 with the intervention of scene personalities such as Arthur Britto, David Schwartz and Ryan Fugger. With Ripple they can circumvent the usual rules of financial networks (banks, PayPal, credit cards, etc.) and avoid fees and money withholding in transactions. This system does not depend on institutions that can make decisions on monetary policy but allows participants to take part in such decisions in a more democratic way. Each node of Ripple works as a local exchange trading system, so that the whole system is a mutual decentralized bank. Ripple’s monetary unit is the XRP, a minable digital currency with a preset unit limit. Much like Bitcoin. Currently Ripple is being used by major companies such as UniCredit, UBS, Accenture, Deloitte and Banco Santander.   Symbol: XRP Official Website: https://ripple.com/ Price: $ 0.0056 Market capitalization:  $ 200,823,794 Dash Dash (DASH) is a digital currency based around blockchain technology and focused on privacy. It was released in early 2014 under the name "Darkcoin" until March 2015 when was renamed Dash. The word Dark was not very marketable name although I personally tought it was helluva name, a lot more powerful than the current one. The main advantage of Dash is allowing you to remain anonymous during transactions, similar to what happens with the cash. In other cryptocurrencies transactions are published in the blockchain and anyone can see who made them and who received them. For Dash the "PrivateSend" technology makes it impossible to trace such transactions. Another distinct advantage is the speed of transactions, which are confirmed almost instantly by the masternodes network. This is a great improvement over other systems where transactions take much longer to be confirmed because this work must be done by the miners.   Symbol: DASH Official Website: https://www.dash.org/ Price: $ 9.23 Market capitalization: $ 61,219,581   You can buy any of these cryptocurrencies in any exchange as  Poloniex, Cex.io Bittrex, Anycoindirect, Cryptomate, Bloombit o ShapeShift.io.