>>71068>Can anyone provide a brief 101 about them?OK.
There are a lot of different cryptocurrencies out there. The most popular and the one that basically started the trend is bitcoin (BTC). Second to bitcoin is litecoin (LTC) and the third most popular, as well as the youngest, is ethereum (ETH). Not completely sure how etheruem works; I'm not even sure it technically qualifies as a coin. Something about contracts.
LTC has the advantage of people trying very hard to keep it stable. ETH generally has the advantage of simply being different.
Different cryptocurrencies work in different ways and I really only know a lot about BTC (the most important coin) and BTC is like the USD of altcoins, so I'm focusing on that.
BTC is created by a process known as mining, which mimics actual mineral mining. People try and mine the coins with crazy supercomputers. Gotta be absolute top of the line for this shit.
These computers compete with each other to solve long math problems. The first to solve all the problems earns BTC.
The difficulty of these math problems are then basically added to the overal difficulty of trying to hack into BTC directly, so its impossible for even the fastest computer to fuck with BTC at a base level; It would take an unfathomably long time. This is part of why BTC can have worth; BTC cannot be forged.
To receive BTC outside the exchanges, you use a wallet address. This address can be pasted as text into basically any text form you want that doesn't detect as spam or something.
The person sending the BTC would then copy the address into whatever program they're using to send BTC, enter the amount of BTC to send and confirm.
Voila. Transaction done. These transactions cannot be reversed, furthermore, you can make any number of wallet addresses you want. If you're careful, these addresses can be completely disassociated from one another and used for only a single transaction if you want before you make a new one. So people like that. (1/2)
