China's First Bitcoin Exchange Acquired by Hong Kong Investors
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You'll have heard all about bitcoin, but it's far from the only example of a cryptocurrency, digital mediums of exchange based on cryptography that feature a secure, distributed ledger known as a blockchain. The system isn't working. At the foundation of this is payments; I need to send money to you, and it's going to go through a bank, with all the dysfunctions of the banking system. So you need a separate system. The result has been a slew of so-called initial coin offerings, many of them out of Hong Kong.
Most, says Wang, are worthless, adding that 90 percent of ICOs are scams. But, human nature being what it is, there are still plenty hong wrong bitcoin stock people interested in putting money into a Ponzi scheme as long as they can assure themselves they're high enough on the chain. Fortunately, not all cryptocurrencies are disreputable. The best-known platform other than Bitcoin is Ethereum. Also based on blockchain, it features currency tokens called Ether.
Where Bitcoin mining—the process of creating the currency by solving preposterously complex calculations — is intensely hardware- and energy-intensive, Ethereum allows the money-creation process to be scripted. Litecoin, for example, is almost identical to Bitcoin, but processes transactions much faster. It features so-called zero-knowledge proofs, meaning that if you hong wrong bitcoin stock prove that a transfer happened, then it happened. A year ago everyone thought anonymous coins were for drug runners.
The Ripple protocol, for example, features a cryptocurrency called XRP, but also supports hong wrong bitcoin stock range of hong wrong bitcoin stock units of value, from currencies to commodities. Transactions are verified based on networks of trust relationships between participants. It has support from banks, who use it as a settlement network, allowing hong wrong bitcoin stock various systems to talk to each other.
Each was created by a so-called hard fork from the original Bitcoin and Ethereum on a different blockchain, after users disagreed about the technical characteristics of the currency. In each case, one version is likely to win out; good luck predicting which. See more wealth management stories on Hong Kong Tatler. Hong Kong Tatler Javascript is disable! Please enable Javascript and refresh to access the site.