01: Crypto dev info: Idea & Choosing technologies

#1 – A Short Introductory to Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin in the past few years has skyrocketed, reaching nearly $20,000 in value in late 2017. Today, it remains at a steady $7,000 but the value of digital assets has significantly gone up over the past few years. Cryptocurrency was invented by a person or team we only know as Satoshi Nakamoto. The official Wikipedia on Satoshi Nakamoto lists 13 different people as being the official creator for Bitcoin.

 

Not long into the creation of Bitcoin, Satoshi had vanished from the project and was never to be seen or heard from again. Since the creation of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency has surged well above anyone’s original expectations and since then, a lot of new digital assets have been created as well. We’ll discuss the top three digital currencies at this point in time.

 

#2 – The Top Three Most Famous Cryptocurrencies

 

#2.1 – Ethereum

Designed by Vitalik Buterin in 2013, Ethereum has risen quickly among the ranks of digital coins. In 2016, a failed DAO project resulted in Ethereum being separated into two different blockchains. There is now Ethereum Classic and Ethereum. Ethereum is still maintained by Vitalik Buterin but Ethereum Classic doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon with stagnant development.

 

 #2.2 – XRP

XRP was released in 2012 but today, the coin is officially owned by Ripple. Ripple today focuses more on payment processing services and financial institutions. If you want more information on Ripple, you can go to the following blog: https://xrphodor.wordpress.com/or you can go to the official Ripple website.

 

#2.3 – Bitcoin Cash

In 2017, a separate blockchain was created when a small team of developers wanted to increase the blocksize of Bitcoin and they wanted to change the initial code. As a result, a hard fork occurred and this split the coin into two different entities. Now, there’s the original Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

 

#3 – An Overview of The Current Market Evaluation and Progress

For the evaluation of the market and cryptocurrency’s total assets, we can use Market Cap. Market Cap is simply a formula of the total number of coins and the price of each coin. Each individual coin has its own value and we can use Market Cap to evaluate this.

 

For example: If Bitcoin is currently valued at $7,376.41 (changes daily) and there’s 17,249,375 coins in circulation, then the total market cap of BTC is valued at $127,238,394,412.

 

As of 4/9/2018, the total market cap was at $240,129,298,509 which is a significant change from January of 2018 which had a total market cap of $800,000,000,000. The price change can be attributed to the fundamentals of FUD, which are Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. This is still a huge price jump from 2013 though, because the total market cap back then was only $1,000,000,000.

 

#4 – Market Manipulation and ICO Frauds

However, with the success and rise of cryptocurrency, there’s bound to be some projects that are questionable and some that are downright scams. There’s been a lot of promising projects that turned out to either be not worth their own weight in salt or just outright scams. (Bitconnect comes to mind).

 

My application doesn’t have a name yet but my main mission is to provide development information for all crypto coins. Think of it as a general Wiki for everything cryptocurrency based with information such as how many commits are made, the number of contributors, the number of releases and more. For contributors, that doesn’t just mean the inventor, that means how many software engineers are on the project and how many people are actively working on it at the time being.

 

The main benefit of this project will be so that investors can look up information on a coin, learn a little about their history and decide whether or not this is a good investment for them. With any investment opportunity, you should always due your diligent research but this project will serve as a nice starting point.

 

If you have any new ideas or features you’d like to see in this project, please let me know and I will discuss these ideas with my team to see if we can bring them to life.

 

#5 – The Technology Involved

For the next few posts on this blog, I want to discuss the technology and fundamentals that’ll be going into this project. This will be to provide useful information to developers and people like minded who may be interested in the project. The backend will be programmed in Python with the Django framework. The UI is nice and clean, which was made possible thanks to the use of proper HTML formatting, clean CSS, clean JS scripting and the Bootstrap framework.