What is Crytocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is a peer-to-peer (decentralized) cryptographic monetary system, devised during the 1980s cyberpunk and hacker culture, the conception of a digital currency outside of the preview of centralized governing institutions and Centralized banking - was an attempt of this subculture to liberate itself from the confines and limitation of liberal-republican democratic societies. The individuals in these groups desired a greater set of freedoms than were allowed in Western Society; these individuals sought to re-establish a Lockean state of nature, where they could recapture the unchained liberties which are endowed to all rational sentient beings. This was a rejection to the limitations that were established by society’s social contract – constitution, and further this was a rejection of the governing bodies that originated from said social doctrine. In essence the cyberpunk and hacker cultures of the 1980s leaned towards anarcho-liberalism on the right-wing fringes, or anarchism of the left-wing fringes; in either case, both groups saw the exercise of state-power as illegitimate and coercive, and that no other social remedy or mediation could be constructed to mitigate the progression of the state from becoming a tyranny, so forth, these groups of individuals sought societal divorce. One of the means that these groups devised to materialize this societal divorce was the creation of a decentralized monetary system that was outside the scope of the state’s controls and jurisdiction; a monetary system of anonymity (full privacy) and autonomy.

Though the first two attempts at an anonymous peer-to-peer digital payment system and monetary system manifested their selves in B-money and Bit Gold, and both were resounding failures. Despite these two precursor cryptographic currencies short-coming, these projects were able to lay the foundation – particular Bit Gold – was able to lay the foundation for the development of the world first successful decentralized cryptographic currency – bitcoin; though Bitcoin is a open-source and open=ledger cryptographic currency, which is far from an anonymous system of payment that was originally devised. Despite this shortcoming, Bitcoin was able to usher in the age of Cryptographic currencies (cryptocurrencies). Furthermore, other crypto-projects, such as Monero, which were inspired by Bitcoin’s success that were founded on the desire to reintroduce full-anonymity on the blockchain – through concealing the public ledger and transactions on the blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin these anonymous (privacy) Crypto projects were meet we harsh repression by central governing agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and Security Exchange Commission (SEC), which saw these Crypto projects as potential-threats in of themselves, or a means for a threat to develop outside their preview, and therefore these governing bodies decided to act heavily handily to limit the adoption of these cryptocurrencies. The governing agencies were able to prevent the adoption and further development of this type of cryptographic currencies, but was overall unable to disrupt, or hinder the localized adoption of privacy-coin Monero. Monero today is 27th largest crypto-project by Market-capitalization, with a a dedicated close-knit community of participates and developers,

The rise of The Bitcoin Fork Crisis caused by a software bug that created distinct diverging behavior emerge between Bitcoin version 0.7 and Bitcoin version 0.8; this divergent behavior become the first “forking” of a crypto-project. Out of nessecity to persence the integrity of the crypto-project the Bitcoin core developer decided to pushed toward what is now known as a “hard-fork” option to perserve the project’s validity, and through consensus of the major mining pools at the time was able to push for a “hard-fork” that proceed seemless. With this successful hard-fork of the Bitcoin crypto-project, the core developers were able to prevent further attacts on the blockchain from the GoldFinger attacker. But this event did not go without consequence, wittnessed to the recent events the future Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin alongside 7 other founding developers proposed a new direction for the Crypto-space through the proposition of a second-generation Cryptographic currency, this new generation of cryptocurrency was proposed to resolve the scability (growing computational cost), consensus, programability and simplicity problems that faced Bitcoin back in 2013, and of which is still present problem with Bitcoin - though Taproot is finally is going to address and resolve most of these issues. Though it is still to be seen if these major upgrades to Bitcoin’s code will bare the fruits that the core developers hope for; but regardless of the outcome, these improvements will help wider adoption, and provide external developer the opportunity to build on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Crypto-space and Wall-Street institutions both do not view Bitcoin as a currency, but instead view Bitcoin as a reserve asset that can storage wealth in their balance sheet reserve, or portfolio. In essence Bitcoin is a digital form of physical gold reserves that a firm could utlitize to storage wealth in the present to pay for future obligations without the wealth depreciating over time. This feature of wealth management is known as wealth retention and it is a important tool to maintain wealth against annual inflation. Given the property to retain the present-day purchasing power of the cash reserves of the firm into the future, while remaining highly liquid, makes Bitcoin a flexible financial vehicle (instrument) for firms that need to set aside cash into the present, but are bound to meet obligation in the future that it is require to service. In consequence Bitcoin has diverged from it initial intented gold of acting as a peer-to-peer montary system, but had transform into a peer-to-peer reserve asset that can be used by private firms and individuals for wealth management.

Lquidity Scale

Lquidity Scale

Long prior to the proposed Taproot upgrade to Bitcoin which was proposed and approved of during this year in 2021, in 2015 Ethereum was the sole second generation cryptographic currency that offered programability/Universality through its proprietary object-orient programming language Solidy and its smart-contract functionality that facilitated the creation of Decentralized applications (DApps) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). In essence Ethereum is an second generation cryptographic currency which introduced smart-contract functionality and its own object-oriented programming language named Solidty to build-out DApps and DeFi protocols on its Blockchain. This development in the crypto-space introduced second generation crypto-projects (protocols) that were built on the decentralized platiform (Ethereum), and secured through decentralized network Proof of Work (mining) blockchain. These crypto-protocols were develop through the smart-contract functionality of Ethereum, and programmed in Solidity under the guidance of the ERC-20 token standardization guideless that stipulates standards and code implementations that are need for the token to be adopt on Ethereum as a protocol.Nevertheless a non-exhaustive list of Ethereum-protocols: Theta TV (Similar to Twitch TV), Synthetix (Decentralized Derivative Market), Uniswap (Decentralized Exchange), Million Token (Bitcoin 2.0), $Whale (currnecy for purchasing NFTs - ERC-721 Non-fungible tokens), and many more crypto-protocols.

Million Token

Million token is a ERC-20 token that was created as a peer-to-peer digital currency with a fixed circulating supply of 1 million tokens, which is pegged at 1 $USDC. In essence Million token is Bitcoin 2.0 on the Ethereum blockchain.

Lastly, we will discuss the third generation of cryptographic currencies Cardano ADA and Ethereum 2.0, which were both devised to yet again address scalability issues, but this time it was Ethereum. With the massive growth of Ethereum adoption, and the development of many widely adopted protocols on the network; execution of the network slowly became an issue, as problem of peer-to-peer proof of work network implementation reared it ugly head again, as the network was faced with growing computational costs. The major scalability issue of Ethereum peer-to-peer proof of work network, as the network grew with wider adoption, also the computational cost of operating the network grew. And with no mitigation attempt to modify the network computational cost - ultimately lead to the periods of time in 2018 and 2021 where adoption of Ethereum and the demands on the blockchain network was the greatest, resulted in beyond normal gas prices for bytes of data computated (mined) by peer-to-peer ETH miners. With this crisis further in mind of the ETH community, alongside an Gas attack by a Chinese group FCoin – something had to be done to result this crisis in 2018. The ETH community and Developers agreed on a upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain to resolve the major scalability and security issues that headed the crisis of 2018. The proposal agreed upon by the ETH community was a paper named “Ethereum 2.0 Mauve Paper”, which proposal 6 crucial upgrades to the network, but most important of these upgrades was moving the Ethereum blockchain from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). This upgrade is the key feature that distinguishes second and third generation cryptographic currencies. Needless to say “Ethereum 2.0 Mauve Paper” was the foundation for the development of Ethereum 2.0 and the creation of the third generation of cryptocurrency.

Lastly, Cardano ADA, it too is also a third-generation cryptographic currency with many of the same features of Ethereum 2.0, though it is owned and managed by HKIO under a search disagreeable person. This person in question was one of the founders of Ethereum, but was removed from the project after several made threats of murder against Vitalik Buterin and another founder. This resulted in the person in question being committed to a psychological facility, where they were eventually released from, and went on to found HKIO. Nevertheless Cardano ADA hope to replace Ethereum 2.0. Nonetheless this is all that has conspired over the passed two and half decades since cryptographic currencies have been envisioned and conceived. There is a long road ahead of the Crypto-space, and a very bright future ahead.

What is Metamask?

Wikipedia:

MetaMask is a software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. It allows users to access their Ethereum wallet through a browser extension or mobile app, which can then be used to interact with decentralized applications.

Metamask is a Ethereum based crypto-wallet that allows an user to interact with the Ethereum blockchain through its browser extension, or smart-phone application. The Metamask wallet is a hot crypto wallet, and therefore is connected to the internet. Metamask requires a internet connection to maintain its functionality as a personal demand deposit for your ERC-20 cryptocurrencies; this personal demand deposit acts just like a traditional bank demand deposit, except you are the custodian of your own money and not a traditional financial institution. That being said, being a personal custodian does require personal responsibilities which are not associated with traditional bank demand deposits; such as maintaining the Recovery Seed Phrase and password associated to one’s crypto-wallet in a secure place, so that they may recover their wallet, if their electronic device is lost, or damaged. In the case one forgets about their password, they could assess their Metamask wallet through their wallet’s Recovery Seed Phrase, and then change their wallet password. Though if one loses their Recovery Seed Phrase, they will not be able to decrypt their wallet, and therefore will permanently lose access to that wallet and all of the ERC-20 tokens inside. It is very important to record one’s Recovery Seed Phrase, and maintain it security at all times.

In regards to public, private key, and signature management; Metamask solely manages your private key and signature, so there is no risk of identity theif, duplication, or fraud. Your public key is your public identifier for your Metamask wallet on public ledgers, and it is the address that one can use to send you ERC-20 tokens.

How to setup MetaMask?

  1. First go to https://metamask.io/. This web page should prompt:
Metamask Front page

Metamask Front page

  1. Click download. The following page should prompt:
Metamask Download page

Metamask Download page

  1. Next, select from the supported Browser/Mobile operating system tab. In my case I will selecting Chrome, as I am on a Google Chrome browser as I type this Markdown article. After selecting the supported browser/Mobile operating system, then click install.
  1. Clicking the “install” button should promp your respective web/mobile application store, where you can “add to Chrome”, or download the application to your smartphone. In my case I clicked “add to Chrome”, and then click “Add extension” to confirm, when prompted.
Chrome Web store for Metamask Wallet

Chrome Web store for Metamask Wallet

  1. Metamask should begin downloading and installing to your Web browser or mobile phone. After it is done, you should be prompted with the following page:
Welcome to Metamask

Welcome to Metamask

  1. Click get started. You should be prompted by the following page:
New to Metamask?

New to Metamask?

  1. Click create a Wallet. You will be prompted with a disclore agreement; you choice what you want to do here. Declining or accepting will not affect your wallet creation, or future use of the wallet.
Metamask Privacy Disclosure agreement

Metamask Privacy Disclosure agreement

  1. After declining or accepting, you will be prompted with password creation page. Create your password, make sure to write it down on a piece of paper, or into a notepad which is save on a safe place on your PC.
Password Creation page

Password Creation page

  1. After creating your password, you will be prompted with a short educational video on MetaMask.
Metamask Educational Video on Securing your Wallet

Metamask Educational Video on Securing your Wallet

  1. Following this ed video; you will be prompted with your Secret Recovery Seed Phrase. Write it down and keep it in a safe place, or copy and paste it to a notepad txt file, or Word doc, and save it somewhere safe on your PC. On the next page, you will be prompted to enter your Seed Phrase to confirmt that your wrote it down, or type it, and still have possession of it in someway.
Confirm Metamask Seed Phrase

Confirm Metamask Seed Phrase

  1. After confirming you possess your Secret Recovery Seed Phrase in someway, you are finally done. You are now able to use your Metamask wallet. (w)
You are finally done!

You are finally done!