cryptocurrencies

What Are Stablecoins, and Are They Safer than Bitcoin?

In 2010, two Papa John’s pizzas cost 10,000 Bitcoins – around 41 US dollars. Today, a $41 purchase would cost just a tiny fraction of one Bitcoin (0.0390 as of August 2019), and 10,000 bitcoins might be worth well over 100 million dollars (or well under, depending on the day). Holding your money in cryptocurrency can be a real rollercoaster, which is why stablecoins have gotten increasingly popular over the last several years. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed specifically to prevent big changes in their value, usually by tying themselves to another asset, like the U.S dollar… Read more

What’s Up With Facebook’s New Libra Cryptocurrency?

Facebook probably isn’t on the top of your list of companies that you would trust to issue a secure, private cryptocurrency, but that’s exactly what they’re proposing to do in 2020 with Libra, a stable, asset-backed token that will be tradeable via their Calibra wallet (to be built into Messenger and WhatsApp) and other apps. With more than 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook’s foray into finance is undoubtedly going to make some waves, so it’s worth it to understand exactly what they plan to do and how it works. If you understand Bitcoin, it may be tempting to apply that knowledge to Libra and… Read more

How to Buy Bitcoin

The inner mechanisms of cryptocurrency are complex to the point of being Byzantine (much like its fault tolerance). Buying and using it, on the other hand, has become surprisingly straightforward, and, much like your smartphone or the Internet, you don’t really have to understand how it works to use it. Even though the proportion of the overall population that currently owns cryptocurrency is still quite low, the tools for buying, selling, trading, and managing it have become much more user-friendly and sophisticated than they were even a few years ago. Step 1: Get a wallet It sounds like this is a place to store… Read more