Bitcoin Cash is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that aims to become sound global money with fast payments, micro fees, privacy, and high transaction capacity (big blocks). In the same way that p ...hysical money, such as a dollar bill, is handed directly to the person being paid, Bitcoin Cash payments are sent directly from one person to another.
As a permissionless, decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Cash requires no trusted third parties and no central bank. Unlike traditional fiat money, Bitcoin Cash does not depend on monetary middlemen such as banks and payment processors. Transactions cannot be censored by governments or other centralized corporations. Similarly, funds cannot be seized or frozen — because financial third parties have no control over the Bitcoin Cash network.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is an alternative to the oldest and most traded cryptocurrency - Bitcoin (BTC), only the BCH network is much faster and cheaper. In 2017, BCH developers modified the BTC code, releasing their own version of the software and a full-fledged competitive product, which split Bitcoin into two blockchains: Bitcoin / Bitcoin Cash, and consecutively, two assets - BTC / BCH. Bitcoin Cash is a clear result of a hard fork in blockchain. Moreover, another hard fork, which divided Bitcoin Cash into two parts: Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV, took place in the fall of 2018.
There are several distinctive features that separate BCH from the origin. The main one remains about the block size. Blocks in the BCH blockchain can be larger, which means that more transactions can be processed at a time, so that the additional space helps to avoid higher fees. However, since the potential block size is larger, storage & audit become more costly and users may find it troublesome to download a copy of the blockchain.
From the technical perspective, Bitcoin Cash is very similar to the Bitcoin algorithm, namely: both projects have a hard cap of 21 million coins, and also use Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus framework and nodes to verify transactions. Thus, traders can consider BCH as a hedging tool, investing in which may save them some risk.
On the plus side, due to the larger block size, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) works faster and has lower transaction fees, which makes BCH a better option for small everyday transactions. Furthermore, Bitcoin Cash supports smart contracts and ecosystem apps like CashShuffle, a coin mixing protocol, and CashFusion, a privacy-enhancing solution for the Bitcoin Cash network. These technologies have their pros and cons: thanks to CashFusion, it becomes extremely difficult to trace the path to the user's assets, however one should bear in mind that commissions are charged for each mixing, so making frequent mixed transactions may have a cost.
Bitcoin Cash provides a platform for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) payments between individuals, with the average transfer fee being as low as $0.01, and the settlement is instant. This means that Bitcoin Cash is suitable for money transfers, international trade, everyday transactions and microtransactions. In addition, Bitcoin Cash supports economic freedoms by providing an alternative form of money, protected against confiscation, any other forms of censorship and devaluation (due to inflation).
Bitcoin Cash is a decentralized network where users influence the development of the protocol. One key attribute is fixed in the code: the maximum supply of BCH is capped at 21 million coins, which is likely to remain so. Show More
Filecoin is a decentralized storage system that aims to “store humanity’s most important information.” The project raised $205 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017, and initially pl ...anned a launch date for mid-2019. However, the launch date for the Filecoin mainnet was pushed back until block 148,888, which is expected in mid-October 2020.
The project was first described back in 2014 as an incentive layer for the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer storage network where users pay for data storage and distribution services in $FIL. Filecoin is open protocol and backed by a blockchain that records commitments made by the network’s participants, with transactions made using FIL, the blockchain’s native currency. The blockchain is based on both proof-of-replication and proof-of-spacetime.
Filecoin is open-source and decentralized, which means that all governance is in the hands of the community. On the Filecoin platform, developers have the opportunity to create cloud file storage services like Dropbox or iCloud. Anyone can join Filecoin and start storing their data or earn money by providing space for someone else's funds. The creators of Filecoin opted for their blockchain technology to run the network and their token with their own consensus.
$FIL is the native currency of Filecoin that powers the entire network and all processes. Clients pay for transactions in FIL tokens. Miners place FIL as collateral, guaranteeing their services.
The developers claim that Filecoin solves the problem of inefficient file storage and retrieval. Customers can find the right solution with an efficient set of tools and its core development, IPFS.
Who Are the Founders of Filecoin?
Filecoin was founded by Juan Benet, who also created the Interplanetary File System. Benet is an American computer scientist who studied at Stanford University. After founding Protocol Labs in May 2014, he attended Y Combinator in the summer of 2014 with the intention of supporting both IPFS and Filecoin, as well as other projects.
What Makes Filecoin Unique?
Filecoin aims to store data in a decentralized manner. Unlike cloud storage companies like Amazon Web Services or Cloudflare, which are prone to the problems of centralization, Filecoin leverages its decentralized nature to protect the integrity of a data’s location, making it easily retrievable and hard to censor.
Decentralized storage systems like Filecoin allow people to be their own custodians of their data, as well as makes the web more accessible to people worldwide. Since participating in the Filecoin network by mining and storing is directly related to winning more block rewards, Filecoin incentives participants to act honestly and store as much data as possible.
How Does Filecoin Work?
There are three parties involved in the Filecoin system: clients, storage miners, and retrieval miners. These groups of users interact closely with each other, concluding transactions, exchanging information, and making micropayments in $FIL.
Clients pay for storing or retrieving data. They place an order on the online storage market, where a deal is subsequently concluded with storage miners. Storage miners, in turn, store client’s data and receive rewards. This group of users places files in free sectors of a hard drive, all actions are recorded in the blockchain, and clients receive private keys.
Retrieval miners extract data at a request of a client. Clients place a trade on the off-chain Retrieval Market. Retrieval miners can also act as storage miners.
Filecoin is based on IPFS where all data is stored on a peer-to-peer blockchain. To start the process, users choose miners to store personal data and pay for placement in FIL tokens. Thereby, miners execute trades, and receive participation fees and FIL rewards. The more storage miners offer, the higher the chances of getting rewarded. At any time, clients can check how their data is stored during a transaction, as proofs are fixed in the blockchain. The Filecoin network uses the Proof-of-Replication (PoRep), while the miners use the Proof-of-Spacetime (PoSt).
Therefore, if a client wants to hopefully keep their data safe on the Filecoin network, then they must pay the miner. The cost is set by the open market, and the price is made up of several factors. In the open market, there is hyper competition among miners, where everyone puts forward their own minimum price for storage.
Benefits of Filecoin
Firstly, with the launch of a large and free market specializing in data storage, there is a tendency to reduce the cost of the service itself. The market becomes more open to everyone, which gives a lower price for using the network.
As of September 2022, the network has united over 20,000 users and computers around the world, creating an extensive community with similar goals and requests. Moreover, Filecoin opts for existing resources, instead of creating new technologies and devices. Miners can join the network from anywhere in the world.
Finally, Filecoin is a decentralized network with its own ways of protecting information and preventing single-point attacks.
Related Pages:
Check out CMC Alexandria’ deep dive into Filecoin.
We’ve also prepared a list of the 5 things that decentralized storage aims to fix.
See terms you don’t know? Check out our glossary on Alexandria.
How Many Filecoin (FIL) Coins Are There in Circulation?
Protocol Labs describes Filecoin’s tokenomics, or economic model, as a “market for data” where users can sell their storage space to other users, who are looking to rent. Five stakeholders will be able to trade tokens: developers, clients, miners, token holders and ecosystem partners. There will also be three Filecoin markets, according to Protocol Labs: file storage, file retrieval and on-exchange token trading.
In fall 2020, 400 miners participated in what was called the “Space Race” testnet phase, increasing Filecoin’s network data capacity by over 325 pebibytes; approximately 3.5 million FIL tokens will be released to the Space Race participants. Show More
Litecoin (LTC) is a cryptocurrency that was designed to provide fast, secure and low-cost payments by leveraging the unique properties of blockchain technology.
To learn more about this project, ch ...eck out our deep dive of Litecoin.
The cryptocurrency was created based on the Bitcoin (BTC) protocol, but it differs in terms of the hashing algorithm used, hard cap, block transaction times and a few other factors. Litecoin has a block time of just 2.5 minutes and extremely low transaction fees, making it suitable for micro-transactions and point-of-sale payments.
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on Oct. 7, 2011, and the Litecoin Network went live five days later on Oct. 13, 2011. Since then, it has exploded in both usage and acceptance among merchants and has counted among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization for most of its existence.
The cryptocurrency was created by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee, who intended Litecoin to be a "lite version of Bitcoin," in that it features many of the same properties as Bitcoin—albeit lighter in weight. Show More
