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Crypto Currency Overview
Digital currency began with a public release of the Bitcoin software. Read the wikipedia article for full historical details and more complete overview.
The original software was called Bitcoin-Qt which can run in two modes:
- desktop client - as a wallet for holding coins, and sending and receiving coins for payments
- server
- miner - since discontinued since CPU mining of Bitcoin is no longer profitable
A crypto coin's network is constituted simply by the software instances communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion similar to bittorrent but specifically using the protocol that was originally introduced by the original Bitcoin-qt software. One of the most important metrics for a crypto currency is its current "network hashrate", which is the sum of the hashrates of all software miners currently active which are contributing to the network.
Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 algorithm for it's hash function. The imposed network difficulty is high enough now such that both CPU mining and GPU mining of SHA-256 based crypto currencies is no longer profitable. FPGA mining will likely soon follow, leaving only ASIC mining.
- network hashrate
- current difficulty
- block reward
- transaction fee
Litecoin is the first crypto coin introduced that instead uses the scrypt hash function. This function is implemented in such a way as to protect GPU mining from ever becoming obsolete, by requiring much more memory than SHA-256 does to remain viable, for which FPGA and ASIC solutions are not adept.
- network hashrate
- current difficulty
- block reward
- transaction fee
Yacoin is the first crypto coin introduced that imposes a further variation upon the scrypt hash algorithm. It adds a variable (forcibly increasing) memory space requirement that will eventually preclude GPU mining from being viable, thus protecting CPU mining as viable even in the long term.
- network hashrate
- current difficulty
- block reward
- transaction fee
- N-factor
- N-factor start time timestamp