A cryptocurrency is a digital money currency. It uses cryptography to secure and verify transactions as well as to control the creation of new units of a particular cryptocurrency.Cryptocurrencies make it easier to transfer funds between two parties in a transaction; these transfers are facilitated through the use of public and private keys for security purposes. These fund transfers are done with minimal processing fees, allowing users to avoid the steep fees charged by most banks and financial institutions for wire transfers.First cryptocurrency for worldwide payment system was Bitcoin.
History
The history of cryptographic currencies started in the 1980s with David Chaum’s work. He is commonly referred to as the inventor of secure digital cash for his paper on cryptographic primitives of blind signatures.Shortly thereafter, Nick Szabo created "bit gold". A currency system based on a reusable proof of work was later created by Hal Finney who followed the work of Dai and Szabo.The first decentralized cryptocurrency, bitcoin, was created in 2009 by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. It used SHA-256, a cryptographic hash function, as its proof-of-work scheme. Soon after, in October 2011, Litecoin was released. It was the first successful cryptocurrency to use scrypt as its hash function instead of SHA-256. Many other cryptocurrencies have been created though few have been successful, as they have brought little in the way of technical innovation. On 6 August 2014, the UK announced its Treasury had been commissioned to do a study of cryptocurrencies, and what role, if any, they can play in the UK economy.
Cryptocurrency has different aspects to consider depending on the country.These very different viewpoints can be separated even further; for example, the technical aspects can be divided into the following non-exhaustive list of fields: cryptography, network and distributed systems, game theory, data science, and software and language security.