Steemit Crypto Academy//Introduction to Altcoins//Submitted to @yohan2on

Happy new week @yohan2on, trust you are doing just fine.

The Lecture on Altcoin is rather interesting I must confess and very important in cryptocurrency.

Ripple at a glance
Ripple is a name of a US based company which aims at providing a more efficient and effective means of sending and receiving funds, within the shortest possible time, at the lowest possible charge and without a middle man, lets say a better payment platform even better than our conventional banks. Though Ripple and XRP are used interchangeably, XRP is the cryptocurrency the powers the Ripple network and also serves as a liquidity source for the network.

Unlike other altcoins, it was introduced to solve some problems facing king Bitcoin. Sometimes in 2004, a platform known as RipplePay for the sole aim of enhancing a secure and fast transactions system and at a very low transaction cost than even what was obtainable in our conventional business banks, was it achieved? Yes, I would say.

The success lead to restructuring of Ripplepay by the Ripple labs which gave birth to the Ripple currency (XRP) integration and the Ripplepay today is known as Open coin. Credit is given to Arthur Britto, Jed McCaleb, David Schwartz and his team for this great project even though the real creator is called the XRP ledger.

source

XRP is a decentralized cryptocurrency, owned by nobody but can be used by everyone, it is also open source and a better alternative to bitcoin's. It was mainly created for banks and other payment networks for receiving, sending and even payment for commodities just like Bitcoin. As stated earlier, BTC has the capabilities Ripple coin(XRP) but had some flaws and XRP was introduced for such.

XRP circulating supply
XRP has a total supply of 100 billion coins compared to Bitcoin with only 21 million coin. This massive difference in total supply solves the problem with supply problem.

XRP transaction speed
One reason altcoins like Ripple coin was created was due to the inconsistencies in transactions experienced with Bitcoin which often take a longer time than necessary. XRP is capable of processing several number of transaction in less than 5 seconds. Am trying to say transactions that would take bitcoin 10 minutes to process will take Ripple coin just 5 seconds, sounds unbelievable but it's real.

XRP mining
Mining is a way in which the cryptocurrency transactions are processed and inturn new coins are generated with miners getting a small token as rewards. New bitcoin are generated through mining, but mining becomes more difficult as more transactions are processed. Whereas bitcoin is mined Ripple coin is not generated through mining but works in its total supply already stated. This is the major difference between BTC and XRP.

XRP with a supply of 100 billion is said to have been premined of which 38 billion has been released into the market and the remain which is stored in the Ripple lab is released periodically.

What are the advantages of XRP
Among other advantages of Ripple coin is the fact that it has a very high volume of coin supply

It is fast and cheap

It is scalable

Secure means for transactions.

Possible Disadvantage
More coins cannot be created as it is designed in such a way that mining is impossible.
It is still not widely accepted worldwide like Bitcoin is, infact the recent lawsuit against the Ripple company really worsened the adoption process.

Altcoins can be very unstable and XRP is not left out of this.

Conclusion
Ripple is one of those altcoins which is very important in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, having being through Alot in recent times is still waxing stronger and stronger. Ripple in its original state seeks to add value to our fait banking system. Many are still watching to see what the future holds for XRP in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Ripple Chief Technology officer has advice investors recently to reduce their holdings of cryptocurrency asset as market predictions not certain. This is wake up call to everyone. source

See you next week sir.

resource material

with paper