In society, we use money to measure how valuable a product or a service is and buy or sell according to money. It’s like the key to our modern civilization, even though we have used it for thousands of years. Money was invented by the Lydians in Mesopotamia. Since then, nations have made their own money, their currencies. However, approaching the end of the 20th century, the internet became popular, which would continue to grow its usage exponentially in the 21st century. We began to virtualize many things, such as money, among many. That is when cryptocurrencies started to appear.
A cryptocurrency is a form of money that is virtual and secured by the cryptography━field that focuses on encrypting and decrypting. The first one was Bitcoin, which is the most known today and worth about $38.000, in 2008-2009. Afterward, other people made their cryptocurrency projects. However, many people did not know what cryptocurrency was and how it worked. Even nowadays, some people are clueless.
Cryptocurrency works on a distributed public ledger called Blockchain. Distributed public ledge is a system where management is not centralized, but it is decentralized. There are many in-depth explanations for this, though they are too advanced to understand. To summarize, it’s a system where anyone can do an operation. However, they require a key to confirm. Also, all cryptocurrency wallets are anonymous, and it’s almost impossible to track where the money went.
We also hear the cryptocurrency mining term frequently. Mining is simply solving combinations of numbers and validating them until finding a matching one.
Many experts think that cryptocurrency is the future of money. We’ve already started to use cryptocurrencies for online shopping, buying cars even for insurance. Regardless of the anonymity and the convenience that cryptocurrencies provide us, there are many risks and vulnerabilities. First of all, cryptocurrencies are commonly used among criminals to transfer money because of their anonymity.
Recently, my friend’s some of his cryptocurrency was stolen because of an exploit of the trading platform. We tried to track him down, but we could not find anything because of the anonymity of the stealer. Except for us, many have suffered from this problem.
Additionally, there are also scams where they announce that they are launching a cryptocurrency. After people invest, they run away with all the investments.
Furthermore, cryptocurrency mining is not environmentally friendly. According to research, at some point, Etherium miners were using more electricity than Argentina, which is a considerably large country. All of these issues make cryptocurrency unsustainable.
Of course, some governments are banning mining, and launching projects without verifying is not allowed. Nevertheless, people can still abuse anonymity, and permitting governments to uncover people behind the crypto wallets will destroy the whole point of cryptocurrency. It could be our future, but it might also create disastrous situations for society.