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Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Altcoins are strictly speaking any coin or token other than Bitcoin. Let’s expand that definition to be more useful though: Altcoins are simply the lesser known coins and tokens.

Some of these are already traded on exchanges like Coinbase, so buying them is as simple as creating an account, connecting your bank, and clicking a button. One such example would be Celo Gold, which is already one of the largest tokens out there, but some may still consider it an altcoin.

But others are much harder to get your hands on. Currently, there are about 7000 of them listed on Coinmarketcap that are traded or swapped somewhere. Some of these have meteoric rises in prices in their early days, but only 100 of them are listed on Coinbase today, so many investors ask themselves: How do I get in on that?

And now that you know what altcoins are, next time we are going to talk about exactly that: how do I buy altcoins?

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Today: Mining and why people do it

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

When you mine actual Gold you have to use very complicated and expensive tools and it becomes progressively harder to get more because you exhaust your source. Similar to Gold, Bitcoins also need to be mined, but with very high powered computers that are specialized in solving complicated math problems.

Today, it takes about 86k kWh to produce one bitcoin which is roughly 8x the amount of energy a single family home in the US consumes per year and while these computers are fast, it takes one computer 3 years of calculation for one bitcoin.

That is why the space got very sophisticated with huge bitcoin farms where many computers work in parallel. Energy and hardware cost together result in about $20k per bitcoin - plus miners currently receive 6.25 bitcoins for every new bitcoin mined as a reward.

That’s why at the current bitcoin value of $42k it is still a very profitable business.

And tomorrow we learn what an Altcoin is.

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Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

The first and today's most valuable cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, launched in 2009. Right after the economic recession it was initially created by an anonymous figure or group called Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 but no one knows its real identity. The initial idea was to create a cash alternative to pay each other with digital money without the need for a bank. From day one the supply was set to be a finite number of 21 million bitcoins. Because of that scarcity it is often compared to gold. Bitcoin attracted the crypto-curious investor as a store of value and because its digital nature it can only be stored digitally.

Bitcoin is volatile and the idea to use it as cash failed. Similar to gold, people buy Bitcoin “not because they expect to be able to go to the store and spend it, but because they expect it to hold its value".

Tomorrow we learn how bitcoins are created.