What is tether? (overview & history)

An Ethereum-based cryptocurrency that looks to disrupt the conventional financial system by offering a stable electronic currency. 

This is referred to as a stablecoin because the value of one USDT aims to represent the value of one USD. Stablecoins like Tether are often easy to buy so they provide a better on-ramp to other forms of cryptocurrency.  all across cryptocurrency markets, tether is listed as USDT. 

 Tether assume that each token was backed by a an actual USD at a 1:1 ratio initially,  but it has since been revealed to much controversy that it is not only USD, but also loans to affiliate companies, compounding with USD and other local currencies like the Japanese yen and the Euro, which make up the company’s asset reserves. Tether Limited, the company who released tether, states that customers have no legal claim, right, or guarantee that their USDT can be exchanged for USD.

Tether has since been launched on other blockchain networks, in a bid to create a stable coin that is interoperable with all major blockchains. EOS and Tron are two of the networks, two very wide and popular blockchain platforms for a range of activities and applications.

The first Tether (USDT) digital tokens were launched in late 2014. At the time the CEO announced that the amount of USDT in circulation was 100% backed by its original currency and could be redeemed at any time with no exchange risk. This statement has since been retracted, Tether Limited offers no legal guarantee of customers being able to redeem their tokens for USD. Tether has at no point been able to provide financial verification that they have much or enough reserves to cover the released tokens.

In early 2015, Bitfinex became the first exchange to allow trading of USDT on their trading network. Bitfinex and Tether have a somewhat controversial background, but nothing came of investigations into potential price manipulation between the two. Since then Tether has been listed on almost all other exchanges.

What is Tether?

A stablecoin, meaning its value remains pegged to the USD at a 1:1 ratio. This creates stable value by ending the fluctuations most cryptocurrencies are facing.  Tether exists both on the Omni Layer (built on the Bitcoin blockchain), the Ethereum blockchain as well as EOS and Tron.

The aim of Tether is to be a stable digital currency that can be used across international borders with no worry of your currency being devalued through exchange rates. It can be used in exchange for goods and services wherever it is accepted and always has a value which is equal  to one USD. Transaction times are much faster than local foreign exchanges and it doesn’t cost to send Tether across the globe.

How does Ethereum works?

Considered a worldwide supercomputer, Ethereum gives people an ability to rent CPU time.  Ethereum uses a consensus mechanism that allows the transactions that occur on the network to be trusted, and that is the reason why it works. The consensus mechanism that Ethereum uses is called Proof of Work, which is the same mechanism that the BTC network uses.

To be able to interact with the Ethereum network and send a transaction to be processed, a small transaction fee is needed to be paid. This transaction fee is referred to as GAS. The gas allows for the computers that will be processing your transaction to be compensated proportionately to the amount of CPU time that will be used.

Read on: advantage & disadvantage of Ethereum

The smart contracts range from being a custom token to a decentralized application (dApps). Any interaction with these smart contracts needs the user to allow the transaction, making Ethereum a well refined and secure network to use for numerous purposes.

Also read on: advantage and disadvantage of Binance BNB

Advantages & Disadvantages of Ethereum

Advantages

Ethereum has a thriving developer, and user ecosystem. This is the biggest advantage of Ethereum. Community involvement and activity should not go under valued, as having a community of users to aid and assist you in your crypto tour is vital when you come across situations and questions that you need answered.

Read on: how does Ethereum works

Ethereum also has a thriving App community. This is also an advantage as it allows a lot of things that you can do with your Ethereum tokens. It is often easy for anyone to create or publish their own tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain. This quenches the barrier to entry to fundraising.

Disadvantages

Ethereum also has some of it own disadvantages. It is vital to know about the numerous issues with Ethereum before kick starting. Issues with scalability if one of the problems Ethereum is facing, meaning the relative number of transactions per second is very low. Ethereum is at the lower end, able to process only 25 transactions per second.

Read on: Binance block chain technology

There are more than a bunch instances of Ethereum smart contract hacks that have taken place since the genesis of Ethereum. It is important that you know this, when trusting a smart contract with your funds. 

Also read on:

History of cryptocurrency

The beginning of Bitcoin

Cadano cryptocurrency

Tether block chain technology

Ethereum (overview & history)

Considered one of the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, Ethereum is a major contender for the Bitcoin throne in the crypto world

Ethereum could looks like just another cryptocurrency but it’s normally a worldwide operated super computer. It might sound like science fiction but it’s true.  like Bitcoin’s network, Ethereum is run on millions of devices around the globe. The actual innovation of this decentralized cryptocurrency network was the unique ability to perform smart contracts on its blockchain. Most people, however, still use Ethereum primarily as cryptocurrency. It remains one of the most popular altcoins in the world and a darling amongst developers and investors alike.

Read on: how does Ethereum works

Ethereum was invented in late 2013 by one of its inventors, Vitalik Buterin. It was later picked up and pursued by co-founders Joseph Lubin and Gavin Wood. During July and August in 2014, Ethereum raised money through a crowdsale, and then formally launched the platform in July 2015.

Ethereum was largely responsible for the cryptocurrency bubble that took place in 2017. This bubble inflated the price of Ether to $1432.88 USD. Ethereum, as a platform made it very easy for people to have their own token, or cryptocurrency. This in turn catalysed a rally in the industry, with most projects raising millions of dollars for their project with nothing more than just a whitepaper. Much like when a company is taken public in an Initial Public Offering (IPO), the cryptocurrency equivalent is called the Initial Coin Offering. ICO’s became very easy to build, launch, and implement with Ethereum as a base platform.

The ease of implementing new tokens came from engineering a “template coin” that allowed for anyone with a simple knowledge of Ethereum to launch their own token. This template standard is known as ERC20, through this, you will often read that a token or coin is an ERC20 token.

Read on: advantage & disadvantage of Ethereum

With numerous projects selecting Ethereum as a platform in which to run their newly crafted cryptocurrency, problems with scaling the network became an issue. Ethereum can process between 20 and 30 transactions per second. When comparing this number to VISA or Mastercard, Ethereum falls short of being able to handle a worldwide load of transactions.

The Ethereum Foundation, which is the governing body that guides the uptake of Ethereum have planned numerous milestones and upgrades to the Ethereum network that in theory, will allow the network to scale to become the global transaction supercomputer that it originally promised to be. These upgrades are dubbed Byzantium, Constantinople, and Serenity. The upgrades range from support for secure random numbers, to sharding. Once completed and deployed, these upgrades will form the Ethereum 2.0 network.

Read on: history of cryptocurrency

Best Ethereum wallets

When storing your Ethereum, there are lots of wallets you can use, including the following:

Keepkey

Ledger NanoS

Trezor Model T

Exodus wallet

Atomic wallet

Jaxx Liberty

Ledger Nano X

Trezor one

Best exchanges for buying Ethereum

You can purchase Ethereum at many cryptocurrency exchange including:

Coinbase 

Crypto.com

Binance BNB

Kucoin

Kraken

Shake pay

Bitpanda

Coinmama

Huobi

Also read on:

How Bitcoin started

How Ethereum works

How Tether works

Binance BNB block chain technology

What is cadano block chain and how it works

The beginning of Bitcoin. (history)

Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper called Bitcoin (BTC) e-cash system, unveiling the efficiency of Bitcoin block chain network.

Satoshi took off on the Bitcoin project August 18th, 2008 when they purchased bitcoin.org
Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies, would not be possible without block chain technology.Satoshi mined the first block of the BTC network January 3, 2009.

Satoshi embedded the first line of the newspaper "the times" on the first block so as to refer permanently to the economic pre-condition that lead to the technology of Bitcoin.

This first block of 50 bitcoins is now referred to as the "Genesis block".
For the first few months of their exestence, Bitcoin had almost no value. Six month after trading started in April 2010, the value of Bitcoin was less than 14 cents. In May, it was bought and by earlyahsst November, it Rose to 36 cents before attaining equilibrium at around 29cents.

Early Markets

While Bitcoin was still low in price and not yet valuable, it was showing it had real global value. It rose to $1.06 February 2011 before reducing in value to 87 cents.
From earlier April to late May, the cost for a BTC rose from 86 cents to $8.79.

After Gawker published a story about currency's appeal in the online drug dealing community, the price goes more than double, even trippled in a week about $27. The market worth of bitcoins in circulation was nearly $130 million. By September 2011 come around. though the value had reduced back to around $4.77.

In 2011, litecoin appeared, as had other spin-off conceptualizations of BTC, often referred to as altcoin. Litecoin was second in market cap with namecoin and seven others trailing in the distance....

BTC price grew steadily in 2012 and in September of the same year, the BTC foundation was founded to promote bitcoin's development and uptake

Amid federal, criminal, regulatory and software related issues, BTC value constantly rose and crashed. It's price reached $755 an November 19 and it crashed down to $378 the same day.... By November 30, it was all the way up to $1,163 again.
Although that was the begging of another long-term crash that ended with BTC dropping back to $152 by January 2015.

Internet fraudsters took over

Lack of centralized control and anonymity make digital currency a lucrative venture and opportunity for online criminals.

In January 2014, Mt.Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange at that time, collapsed and declared bankruptcy, loosing 850,000 bitcoins, it is likely that the Bitcoin were actually stolen slowly over time, starting in 2011, and resold on various exchanges for cash, until one day Mt.Gox checked their wallets and found they were empty.

When this hack spread outs and some major stakeholders gone bankrupts, crypto traders were advised to use a hardware or software wallets to safely store their currencies.

Bitcoin recovers

Bitcoin price rose steadily year over year, going from $434 in January 2016 to $998 in January 2017.
In July 2017, a software upgrade to BTC was approved, intending to enhance the lightening network as well as prove stability.

Few days after the upgrade was implimented, in August, BTC was trading at around $2,700, and by the end of the year, Bitcoin reach the all time high of just under $20,000.

Simultaneously at that time, a new block chain called Ethereum was noised abroad in the cryptocurrency sphere and was the number of two currency on the market, generating over $200,000 different projects and still counting....

Interestingly, all of them use the Ethereum block chain. Though all these projects have their own cryptocurrencies with different purpose and goals which are quite and often different from BTC's.
Then cryptocurrency world continues to expand and grow in market cap as there now also other block chains trying to compete with Ethereum, such as cardano or Tezos.

Actual recovery

Bitcoin was not able to sustain all it's all-time, and Ethereum, which reached it's own all-time high in January 2018 at around $1,400 was also not able to sustain.

Security and financial regulations concerns due to continued exchange hacks contributed to the decline and by the end of 2018, Bitcoin had dropped down to around $3,700.

Since the end of 2018, BTC along with most other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum not excluded have rebounded in the present.
As the market becomes more equilibria with increased knowledge, and with the implication of concepts such as stablecoins and decentralized finance, it is easy to be happy about investment and technological potential, weather Bitcoin or another block chain projects you might be interested in....

Conclusion

"Ten thousand Bitcoin for two large pizzas"
This is considered the first real world Bitcoin transaction in history. Famously known as "Bitcoin pizza day", May 22, 2010 was the first time Bitcoin, which is now valued at about $12,000 per piece was used to purchase something tangible.

To get these two pizzas, the bitcoins were sent to a volunteer in England, who made a transatlantic phone call and paid for the $30 delivery of the pizza to a man in Florida.

Also read on:

History of cryptocurrency

History of Ethereum

Binance BNB

History of cryptocurrencies

Crypto began in the late 1980s

The idea is for a currency that could be sent anonymously and in such a way that does not require centralized entities. I.e local banks.

David Chaum, an American cryptographer in 1995 implimented an untraceably cryptographic e-money called Digicash, this was the early form of cryptographic electronic, when during payments and transactions, it requires users software to withdraw from local bank and inquire specific encrypted keywords or strings before it could be sent to the receiver.

Read on: How does Ethereum works

Often called direct precursor to Bitcoin, Bitgold was designed in 1998 by Nick Szabo. Users must dedicate device power to solving cryptographic puzzle before receiving the reward, putting both Szabo and chaum's concept together, then you have something you can Bitcoin twin.

Without the use of a central authority, and so, it was not until a decade later when an anonymous person or persons, using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, unveiled a white paper called Bitcoin BTC- A peer to peer e-cash system, that the history of BTC and subsequent cryptos began.

Also read on:

History of Bitcoin

Ethereum

Binance BNB

How to buy Tether

How to purchase cadano and how it works