Coins

After the Cypherpunk movement had already discussed digital cash in the 1990s, Satoshi Nakamoto presented the first completely decentralized digital cash in the Cryptography mailing list on November 1, 2008: Bitcoin. In the first mail, Nakamoto wrote: "A pure peer-to-peer version of an electronic payment method would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

This sentence describes the basic idea of Bitcoin very succinctly. Bitcoin is a completely decentralised payment system that does not require a third party or intermediary. The technical basis for this is the blockchain technology that Satoshi Nakamoto invented with Bitcoin. For Bitcoin, the blockchain represents the entire history of all transactions." Transactions are remittances, inputs and outputs of coins that are considered confirmed when a miner, i.e. a node in the Bitcoin P2P network, has inserted them into a block.

This very simply described basic principle of a blockchain is regarded as a paradigm for thousands of alternative crypto currencies, the so-called Altcoins, which have been created since about 2011. Initially, only simple clones of Bitcoin, which only made slight modifications to the source code of Bitcoin, were released. In the following years, however, completely newly developed and innovative crypto currencies such as Ethereum, XRP, Monero and Dash emerged.