Blockchains are one of the core backbones for decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. In this easy-to-understand guide, we cover the fundamentals of blockchains and the problems they solve.

Expected time to completion: 1-2 hours

Strengths

Ripple has turned the tables on financial activism by directly targeting banks and helping them to instantly and cheaply affect worldwide transfer of money. They have effectively force-fed an incentive that has slowly turned pro-establishment financial institutions to embrace blockchain technology by showing them a better way of doing what they do. Buying and holding XRP is an investment in and of itself in the long run since its traffic, (and hence demand) has been growing.

Ripple confirms transactions in under 4 seconds, and it handles more than 10,000 transactions per second, giving it a huge edge over Bitcoin (which does less than 7 transactions per second) and many other altcoins.

As Ripple continues to appeal to larger banks, XRP continues to gain traction. The blockchain holds the third largest market capitalization amongst cryptos (~ $8 billion), after Bitcoin and Et...

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken

The Current System

Imagine Joe is your best friend. He’s traveling overseas and on the fifth day of his vacation he calls you and says: “Dude, I need some money. I’ve completely run out.”

You, being the nice person you are, reply “sending some right away,” and hang up.

The requirement of this method is that there must be enough people who don't want to depend on a third-party. Only then can this group maintain the register on their own.

“It might make sense just to get some Bitcoin in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”  ~ Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009

How many are enough? At least three. But for our example, we will assume ten individuals want to give up on banks or any other third-party that manages transactions. Upon mutual agreement, they have details of each other’s accounts all the time — without knowing the other’s identity.

Almost a decade ago, Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, silently disrupted trust-providing organizations, like banks, with an eight-page long research paper describing how money can be decentralized (through Bitcoin). At the time, not many people understood the potential that those eight pages concealed within themselves.

The potential isn't just in decentralizing money — but in decentralization itself. In those eight pages, Nakamoto didn’t just explain how we can regain control over our money — he offered a new way for strangers to safely collaborate with each other.

Here, we discuss five different ways blockchain will fit into your company in less than ten years from now.

Because of its unique properties, blockchain technology can be used in many different industries, ranging from banking and accounting to the entertainment industry.

Contracts

What would you call a business that isn’t “doing bus...

There has been a lot of flux and discussion in the bitcoin community about what happened on August 1, 2017 and what it means for the future. Prior to the split that created Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the Bitcoin community was faced with a lot of unanswered questions: Will the cryptocurrency split into two new ones? Will it not? What is BIP 91? What is BIP 148? What is SegWit?

This guide will walk you through the whole situation as it unfolded, and to help you understand what actually happened and why the bitcoin ended up getting split into two — Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), it’s best to take a look at one of the fundamental issues of cryptocurrency and the various proposed solutions.

On one side, there are the people who manage the open source software for bitcoin. They are the organisation/community that keeps the development on the bitcoin protocol running. On the other side are the miners, who deploy computing resources to run the bitcoin network (blockchain). Both sides are crucial to keep the bitcoin running — one side can’t do it without the other. To fully understand the ...