>Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. It’s completely decentralized with no server or central authority.
>
> – Satoshi Nakamoto, 09 January 2009, announcing Bitcoin on SourceForge.
Cryptocurrency is a subset of digital currency, which acts as a medium of exchange amongst two parties. It is known as crypto-currency because of the utilization of cryptography in securing its transactions. There are various cryptocurrencies including Litecoin, Dash, Ethereum, Ripple, and the currently most popular one Bitcoin.
There are hundreds to thousands of cryptocurrencies as of 2018 with new ones coming out on a regularly. Most will never take off. This form of peer-to-peer value exchange is in its infancy still; Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies have yet to become widely used. Venezuela has made history by becoming the first nation to introduce a national cryptocurrency in a time of national emergency with a goal of circumventing US sanctions and access to international financing.
Cryptocurrency enables trustless and anonymous transactions since it does not involve any third party - there is no central bank. Instead, a blockchain keeps a ledger of transactions across a public network of computers. Blockchains are append-only, meaning nobody can change past transactions.
Unlike normal currency, cryptocurrency is infinitely divisible and can be exchanged in tiny fractions. For example, transactions can amount to 0.00007 BTC or even lower. Currently the smallest amount of bitcoin ever recorded on the block chain is 0.00000001 BTC also called satoshi (in honor of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto).
Bitcoin is a deflationary currency as opposed to most Fiat currencies which are affected by inflation over time. There is a max cap on the amount of Bitcoins that can be mined which is 21 million. The circulating supply of Bitcoin has surpassed 17 million. This means that over 80% of the Bitcoins which will be ever be mined, have already been mined.
Upon the completion of mining, it does not necessarily mean the end of data mining as miners can still be incentivized in other methods, namely through transaction fees by other user in order to be included in the ledger.
Many cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin can be earned by validating transactions on the network. This process of validation is called "proof of work" and consists of mathematically guessing a random numbers (usually less than a certain determined value or "difficulty") to attempt to match the blockchain's irreversible cryptographic hash function. As more transactions are validated (and rewards for validation are collected) over time, the difficulty of finding the correct hash increases. An increase in the popularity of cryptocurrency mining over the past few years has outpaced the development of the average computational power of a household computer, so in order to mine effectively, one requires a computer (or computers) with especially powerful graphics cards (such as the Nivida GTX 1080) or specialized cryptocurrency mining equipment (such as the Fast-Hash One or CoinTerra TerraMiner IV). It should also be noted that, because of drawbacks of proof-of-work validation (such as energy inefficiency), some cryptocurrencies are exploring alternative algorithms such as "proof of burn".
Search for a community to publicize your currency:
* At the very start you should always think where to market your currency. Engage with them and learn what they really want to feed on. After a satisfiable round of searching and learning, you can surely move onto coding the coin.
Code your coin to be perpetually un-hackable:
* It is not very difficult to build you coin with some sprinkles of un-hackability with Bitcoin/Ethereum already in place. You can surely use these open source blockchains already in place. The only time that is need will be invested into changes you need to make in these.
Bring in some miners:
* Miners are indispensable for some cryptocurrency but there are some cryptocurrencies like IOTA which doesn’t require any miner as such. You should use some miners for your currency to gain popularity and benefit some people who use their computing resources.
Grow a merchant base:
* Once you get your miners mining for the currency, you should grab hold of some merchants who accept your currency when presente** The trust you build with these people will help you grab a huge set of customers in the long run.
Targeted Marketing:
* Target your customers in local than global reach. Not only it is easier to publicise but also it becomes easier for you to be present in person and gain their confidence.
### Technical Aspects
Technically speaking, you can have variations in new cryptocurrency implementation as of below:
You can fork a popular cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Litecoin, change some parameters and make your own coin up and running.
**Pros:**
* Very customizable as per your requirement
* Easy to list on exchanges
* Mining possible
**Cons:**
* Technically challenging to implement
* Will require solid consensus mechanism apart from what already present
You can simply prepare a ERC-20 smart contract in blockchain like Ethereum and let people invest into it using the base currency ETH
**Pros:**
* Technically very simple to implement
* Customizable to your requirement
* Mining not required as base token is ETH and there is already huge list of miners out there.
* Consensus will be already integrated by Ethereum
* Implementation will be fast as core blockchain code doesn’t need tweaking
**Cons:**
* You need to set an exchange value initially between your token and ETH
* Exchange listing is quite complex
You can also run your blockchain node like in Ethereum which will be pre-funded with a certain number of tokens in the genesis block and miners can do proof of work to get benefitted
**Pros:**
* No need to deploy any smart contract
* Can have miner community external of any network
Cypherpunks, crypoanarchists, and libertarians paved the way for the right to privacy and deregulating the government's control and diminishing individual citizen's autonomy.
