Guide to the top 10 Cryptocurrencies for beginners - part FINAL

This is a 3 part guide, Click here for part 1

What this post is about

I want to do a post about all the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market share, a little information about each of them. If you have been around cryptocurrencies for a while this post might not be for you so just keep that in mind.

Glossary of terms used in this post.

Market Cap - Market capitalization is just a fancy name for a straightforward concept: it is the market value of a cryptocurrencies available supply. This figure is found by taking the current coin price and multiplying it by the total number of coins that have been mined.

White Paper - A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue and presents the issuing body's philosophy on the matter. It is meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision. This is usually the first information to come out about a cryptocurrency

Blockchain - Every node in a decentralized system has a copy of the blockchain. No centralized "official" copy exists and no user is "trusted" more than any other. Transactions are broadcast to the network using software applications. Mining nodes validate transactions, add them to the block they're creating and then broadcast the completed block to other nodes. Blockchains use various timestamping schemes, such as proof-of-work to serialize changes.

7 - Monero - MNR

About Page | Website

Current price:  $6.45
Market Cap: $84,313,036
Available Supply: 13,055,677

My Thoughts:
I had heard about Monero when learning about some people who spent a lot of money using AWS instances to mine the blocks of Monero, resulting in a big payoff when it hit the exchanges. I wouldn't risk it without doing your own research but it is definitely an interesting story. I haven't yet done a whole lot with Monero, but its premise and ideas his it on my radar.

Explained:
To most people, financial privacy is very important. Yet in recent years, we have seen a staggering amount of big corporations, banks and governments having their records compromised, at every time leaking information about their users, their practices, their balance sheets. The unfortunate but undeniable conclusion is that there is no safe place to conduct private transactions.
There was no safe place to conduct private transactions. Monero provides a place where your financial activities are private. Monero is one of the leading cryptocurrencies in the post-Bitcoin world, and it is built on principles of privacy, decentralization, and scalability.
From an economic point of view, a currency needs to be fungible. Fungibility is a property of money that makes all units "equal". Without fungibility, money flows can be tracked and tainted, making it very difficult to use the digital tokens as money.

Monero is a secure, private, untraceable currency. It is open-source and freely available to all. It’s fairly launched on april 18th 2014, without premine or instamine. The Monero technology already spiked the interest of several established people in the bitcoin development world and cryptography community. The development is completely based on donations, community driven and with a strong focus on decentralization and scalability. With Monero, you are your own bank. Only you control and are responsible for your funds, and your accounts and transactions are kept private from prying eyes. - About Page

8 - Dash - DASH

White Paper | Website

Current price:  $12.14
Market Cap: $82,513,411
Available Supply: 6,792,372

My Thoughts:
While mixing is available in different forms for all cryptocurrencies, Dash having it as a core focus to keep transactions anonymous speaks to me. I am not one who says "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about", to me we should always take steps to keep our privacy and security intact. I have seen Dash here in Australia on bitcoin atms which makes me happy, anything that helps increase crypto prevalence is good to me!

Explained:
Dash (DASH) is a privacy-centric digital currency with instant transactions. It is based on the Bitcoin software, but it has a two tier network that improves it. Dash allows you to remain anonymous while you make transactions, similar to cash.
With Bitcoin, transactions are published to the blockchain and you can prove who made them or to whom, but with Dash the anonymization technology makes it impossible to trace them. This is important because the blockchain is accessible to anyone with an internet connection – a significant drawback for those don’t wish their transaction history and balances to be publicly available. Dash does this through a mixing protocol utilizing an innovative decentralized network of servers called Masternodes, avoiding the need for a trusted third party that could compromise the integrity of the system.
Dash transactions are almost instantly confirmed by the Masternodes network. This is a great improvement on Bitcoin’s system, where confirmations take much longer because all the work is done by the miners. - About Page

9 - Steem - STEEM

White Paper | Website

Current price:  $0.41
Market Cap: $68,377,470
Available Supply: 164,393,559

My Thoughts:
I love the idea of steem, we are definitely in early days at this stage. I don't 100% like the layout of the articles at this stage and would like more features (limited access to CSS on posts etc). I love browsing reddit on mobile and am hoping one day to have the same sort of experience on mobile. I hope that the platform grows to attract more varied and experienced authors.

Steem Explained:

Steem is a blockchain database that supports community building and social interaction with cryptocurrency rewards. Steem combines concepts from social media with lessons learned from building cryptocurrencies and their communities. An important key to inspiring participation in any community, currency or free market economy is a fair accounting system that consistently reflects each person's contribution.

Steem is the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of individuals who make subjective contributions to its community. - Steem White Paper

10 - NEM - XEM

Technical Reference | Website

Current price:  $0.0044
Market Cap: $39,749,760
Available Supply: 8,999,999,999

My Thoughts:
I really like the design of NEM, my uses have been quite seemless and the team seems to be hard at work updating it often. There is a new mobile client that works really well, I will be keeping my eye on NEM in the future.

Explained:
NEM, in its most basic form, is a crypto currency that is built on block chain technology. The NEM block chain is an improvement on existing block chain technologies. It integrates concepts from other cryptocurrencies (e.g.Bitcoin) and academic research in network theory.

NEM’s primary contribution to the crypto currency landscape is a new consensus mechanism called Proof of Importance (PoI). Unlike Proof of Work (PoW), it is environmentally sustainable and does not require large scale computing resources in perpetuity. PoI is similar to Proof of Stake (PoS) except that it is not solely derived from the size of an account’s balance. It incorporates other behaviors that are believed to be positive for the holistic economy. In this way, it attempts to reward active economy participants at the expense of inactive ones and dampens the rich getting richer effect that is inherent to PoS.

NEM’s vision is to be the foundation of a vibrant crypto currency ecosystem that emphasizes security and trustless computing. NEM was launched with built-in support for multisig transactions and encrypted messages. Additionally, the peer-to-peer (P2P) NEM network implements a modified version of Eigentrust++ to identify and minimize the impact of malicious nodes. - NEM Technical Reference

Thanks for reading

I will be doing a deep dive into each of these cryptos in my future videos, tutorials, programming and uses. Follow me for more!