The Risk of Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrencies are a libertarian ideal: a monetary system outside the control of big government. The modern digital world provides the necessary components for a cryptocurrency to succeed. Computing power has advanced sufficiently to lower the processing burden of cryptography. Now systems are both powerful enough and affordable enough that there is a sufficiently large audience for a cryptocurrency system. But where cryptocurrencies solve some of the fundamental problems of centralized currencies, they also introduce some new problems while still falling victim to other, age-old problems. Bitcoin is synonymous with cryptocurrency for a lot of people. It was an early cryptocurrency system, and the first to achieve a large scale of adoption. Since 2007 when Bitcoin appeared, the cryptocurrency space has increased exponentially. Special-purpose cryptocurrencies add new features. But Bitcoin includes two pieces of technology that are applicable to a wide variety of cryptocurrenci...