Red pill me on cryptocurrency

File: snowjazz.jpg (1005KB, 3236x2152px) Image search: [Google]

1005KB, 3236x2152px

>How do you buy it?

You can buy the big ones like bitcoin and ethereum with fiat currency, normal cash, via bank transfers and credit card

The rest is mostly only purchasable with bitcoin, so you need to buy bitcoins and exchange them for other cryptos on exchange sites like poloniex, bittrex etc.

>Are they all anonymous?

No, not all

>Are some more anonymous than others?

Zcash, Monero, Nem and PivX is supposed to be untrackable, but so was bitcoin back in the day, but these might be different.

>What is mining?

dont know enough about this one, it also varies between coins, some can be mined, others cannot.

>Why are there limited amount if it doesn't actually exist, only in the digital world?

they would be worthless if there existed unlimited amount, imagine if gold was as common as stone.

>And what's the next big one?

Ethereum

>>1874817
>How do you buy it?,
From someone who has them or from an exchange.

>Are they all anonymous?
No. Most are not. Most exchanges require you to show a government-issued ID. And due to the public ledger with enough effort you could track most transactions back to their source. Also, what are you going to do or buy that will not lead back to you in one way or the other? If you have goods shipped or money wired to you or if you use anything from your home IP, it doesn't really matter how anonymous the crypto coin transaction is, since the other stuff is so easlily tracable.

>Are some more anonymous than others?
Yes. Bitcoin has dodgy privacy at best. Some alt-coins have emerged with more focus on privacy, but they usually have other issues that probably don't make them work in large-scale systems.

>What is mining?
Transactions are stored on a so-called blockchain. Each block has to be cryptographically signed, which takes a lot of computing power. The reward for doing this is you get to include a transaction in the block that gives you newly-created tokens. Signing blocks is called mining, because you create new tokens through work.

>Why are there limited amount if it doesn't actually exist, only in the digital world?
It's a design choice. Not all crypto coins have this trait. Some think having a limited supply is awesome, others think it's a terrible idea.

>And what's the next big one?
Nobody knows. I don't think we're even sure what the current big one is, to be honest...

>>1874842
>>1874848
Thanks guys. Cleared up a fair bit.

What exactly is mining? Like does that mean I can go out and like find coins for free? Lol

>>1874859
Mining, in the rough, is basically just converting compute power into coins or tokens desu

>>1874859
Yeah, but not really for "free".

Each unique block requires you to find a matching number to sign it, which is essentially a very hard math puzzle. So hard, that you're reduced to randomly plugging numbers into the equations until one fits.

You can run this on your home computer, but you'd have to get insanely lucky to be the first one figuring out the puzzle, because if someone in the world beats you to it, everyone has to start from scratch with the next block.

This is why most people band together in large mining pools, so they spread the trying-out of numbers around to be faster and then share the rewards as well.

In any way it would technically not be free. Because if you want to compete you probably need specialized hardware or at least powerful GPUs (which one is best depends on the coin) and you need to invest a *lot* of electricity into hours and hours of 100% load computing. There are calculators on the web to figure out how expensive a coin would have to be to be profitable when mining with your system.

It's usually not worth it. We're talking about cents per day in profits.

You need vast quantities of blue pills to be red pilled on cryptocoin federal reserve life extension

File: IMG_20170316_004220.jpg (30KB, 256x362px) Image search: [Google]

30KB, 256x362px

>>1874817
The red pill is Monero

pivx for <3months
nxs for >3months
nxt for prayers

File: ultra rare pepe plz no save.jpg (209KB, 500x667px) Image search: [Google]

209KB, 500x667px

>>1874859
Basically your lending your computing power to do calculations for the blockchain to process transactions and all that. If your computer is the one to discover the new block then you get a reward. Some people find it more beneficial to be part of a mining pool, which is where a group of people team up to mine a currency and then share the rewards between them.

>>1874817
>What is mining?
This is one of the most important questions that just a few people seem to really understand. It all comes down to hashing functions, specially this one called sha-256 in the case of bitcoin. A hashing function is nothing more than an algorithm which takes a string of numbers and letters as input (any size) and then spits out a new string that will always be the same length (according to the function).

The thing is that it's pretty much impossible to predict what will the output be for a given input. Let's say the first part of your input is '4chankek', go and google sha-256 encoder and put that in. Now try to add something to that original string until the output starts with 18 zeroes. Pretty hard to do by hand ah? Imagine you got millions of people trying to do the same thing at the same time. The first one who finds the next correct string to complete the hash gets the reward, and the process starts again.