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December 03, 2017

Valley Drag Episode 5: Cryptocurrencies

This week on Valley Drag, we take a look at Cryptocurrencies.

Show Notes:

Terms:

Cryptocurrency – just money whose transactions are secured by encryption.

Blockchain – A distributed ledger of transactions. This is what allows bitcoin and other altcoins to be decentralized (they’re not tied to a government or a bank or any one person distributing the currency). In blockchains, every node in a network has access to the entire global ledger, and anytime a transaction anywhere happens, the global ledger must be updated and the change propagated to all nodes. Given that blockchains are peer-to-peer, modifying the history is extremely difficult, because you would need a majority of the network to agree on the change. Because blockchains are distributed and track every single transaction globally, they’re constantly growing in size.

Mining – Individuals help maintain the blockchain by “solving” blocks (finding a specific value required to validate a block of transactions) . This is a way of distributing the calculations needed to verify transactions. A miner who successfully generates the solution for a block is awarded with newly generated bitcoin.

Fiat currency –

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