Cryptocurrency has made people millionaires and turned people’s lives into dreams, also cryptocurrency has done the opposite – making people lose all their savings and turn completely broke.
Maybe it sounds like gambling to you?
If yes, then you might be right in a way because most types of investments are a gamble a little bit.
But in the gamble of the cryptocurrency losers are those, who aren’t educated (no knowledge of basic things) enough about cryptocurrencies or just people who put all their funds in cryptocurrencies without doing the necessary analysis.
The ones who lost probably didn’t know the difference between cryptocurrency and cryptography.
And you can be happy because you’re here reading this post, and if you keep reading it you will gain knowledge that will make you take a step forward – away from the unwanted losses.
To figure out the difference between something we need to know and understand individually what those things are before we start looking for their differences, so let’s find out what’s cryptography, then – what’s a cryptocurrency and, then we can move into the area of figuring out the difference between them.
“Hidden-writing”
Cryptography, also known as cryptology comes from two words.
Those two words are “crypt” and “graphy” with two different meanings – as you expected.
“Crypt” stands for “hidden” or “vault”, but “graphy” means “writing”, so the title now makes sense and probably you now can imagine what’s cryptography, if you can’t – don’t worry because now we’re going to dive deeper in it.
Cryptography, as its name may give off is creating written or generated codes whose job is keeping the information a secret, the codes do it by taking the data or information and turns that data into an unreadable format – not completely unreadable but only unreadable for unauthorized users.
The idea for cryptography is to create codes that are hard to decrypt because if you want to decrypt the code and read the information, you need a special key that is made for decrypting the specific code.
Long story short, cryptography is:
- writing a message or information
- generating a code that will hide the information and is hard to decrypt
- generating a complex cryptographic key known only to the recipient of the message
- decrypting the code with the cryptographic key and reading the information
What’s The Point of Cryptography?
Before we move to understand what really is a cryptocurrency, here’s what cryptography is often used to protect:
- Data privacy
- Web browsing
- Credit card transactions
You Must Understand What’s Cryptocurrency If You’re Living In The 21st Century
In these days we live in, cryptocurrency is a hot and trending topic.
A lot of businesses, banks, and governments are conscious of cryptocurrencies, even though most people aren’t really educated or smart on the topic of cryptocurrency but we have to realize that cryptocurrency is our future and we should be ready for it.
So, let’s dig into this topic and first of all – define cryptocurrency in a way that’s understandable to a human.
Money That Doesn’t Have A Smell
Just reading the word you can notice it’s actually two words – “crypto” and “currency”, are you starting to have some idea what could it be? Maybe it’s “hidden currency”?
If you had that thought – good job, but really cryptocurrency is just like normal money or currencies, only cryptocurrencies are in the digital world and it lays on cryptography and encryption – that way the transactions of crypto coins and currencies are secure.
No more cash, credit cards, and even checks, actually, you don’t even need a bank – that’s what cryptocurrency is all about, and you can send it directly to others, that’s why no bank is necessary.
Also, what people like about cryptocurrency transactions is that things like social security or credit score aren’t needed. Cryptocurrencies keep a record of all transactions and then those transactions get grouped into blocks, cryptographically signed blocks (did you notice cryptography sneaking in?)
With all these benefits of cryptocurrencies, there are even more. You can send money from one country to another without paying the enormous international fees, also, payment frauds aren’t possible with cryptocurrencies because you can only spend what you have.
The Biggest of Them All
And there are many types of cryptocurrencies to choose from, some are worth more, some less, and the same with their stability – some are fewer fluctuations, some more.
Definitely, the most famous one of the currencies of the crypto is Bitcoin. (Fun fact: cryptocurrencies are a side product of Bitcoin and the invention of Bitcoin wasn’t to make a currency.) It’s so famous that more people know what’s Bitcoin but has no idea what’s cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin started becoming famous when its value of it started rising lightning-fast unexpectedly, but aside from Bitcoin there are other cryptocurrencies like Litecoin, Dash and Ripple, Ethereum, and many more, in fact, there are so many that you can even create your own cryptocurrency!
Cryptocurrencies Are Going To Destroy Banks
To sum up, cryptocurrency is a brand new way of making secure transactions without the intervention of banks and that also means – a really small commission fee! But the priority of cryptocurrency is security that’s provided by modern technologies based on cryptography and blockchain.
Cryptocurrencies are not going away anytime soon – they’re here to stay and change the world around us, in fact, they’re already changing it. In order to protect themselves from the devaluation of their national currency, many people buy Bitcoin.
Of course, banks and national governments are realizing it and they understand that cryptocurrencies can seize their power.
Turns Out Cryptography and Cryptocurrency Isn’t The Same Thing
I’m glad you got this far. Congratulations on reading through all this information because now you know that cryptography and cryptocurrency aren’t the same things, in case you didn’t know that before.
You can tell the difference yourself, but it’s really simple – cryptography isn’t a digital currency but cryptocurrency is, and cryptography does support the security of cryptocurrency.
