Bitcoin is easily the best-known and most valuable cryptocurrency, but there’s more to cryptocurrency than just Bitcoin – and much more to the technology behind it than just digital money.
All cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain technology: an immutable, decentralised ledger system that’s like a robust, trustless database. Copies of the blockchain for each currency or project are scattered across the computers of all participants in the network, ensuring that there is always a backup and drastically reducing the possibility of bad actors successfully changing records.
Bitcoin’s rapid rise and fall in value in late 2017 has led some to denounce the digital asset and others, labelling as a bubble that popped, but the wider cryptocurrency market keeps growing: it sits at a market cap of about $570bln as of this writing, with other currencies such as Ethereum, Tether, and Ripple each well above the $10bln mark respectively.