Why is Crypto so important and should I care?
In essence, cryptocurrency is – as blockchain based platforms are meant to be – completely decentralised. As a financial based blockchain, that means it is not governed by any central bank or monetary authority. It is rather maintained by a peer-to-peer community computer network made up of users’ machines or “nodes”. If you know what BitTorrent is, the same principle applies.
Using blockchain, it is effectively a digital database – a “distributed public ledger” – which is run via cryptography. Cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin is secure as it has been digitally confirmed by a process called “mining”. Mining is a process where all the information entering the Bitcoin blockchain has been mathematically checked using a highly complex digital code set up on the network. That blockchain network will confirm and verify all new entries into the ledger, as well as any changes to it.
Note that while it is fundamentally anonymous, the mathematics behind it makes it a global public transaction ledger, so every transaction can ultimately be traced through cryptography.