With the recent news on BitCoin and Ethereum, there seems to be a burgeoning awareness among people of cryptocurrency. Despite that, I still don't think they've truly gone mainstream. Having spoken with friends about BitCoin for about 5 years now, this phenomenom is quite amazing, and I'm curious to see what we think about using it.

It's weird, and it's something that many websites can't seem to explain properly.

How exactly do these cryptocurrencies gain traction? Couldn't anyone simply make their own? What prevents a generic Bitcoin from becoming as successful as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?

With how little I know about the subject, it'd be inappropriate to give an opinion

I kind of like their idea, but I really dislike the idea of mining cryptocurrencies. I'm under the impression that currency mining is already using a lot of electricity despite being a relatively small thing, and it's only going to get bigger. I think there needs to be something smarter than that. The basic idea before cryptocurrencies is pretty genius though.

1. People start using them. The reasons probably vary, but I don't have any real information on this.

2. Yes.

3. In theory, nothing. In practice, Bitcoin's success makes it hard for any other cryptocurrency to overthrow it, but nothing's preventing it either. I'm not an expert, but considering the immaturity of the whole cryptocurrency situation, I'm actually expecting some other currency to become the most popular one sooner or later.

It's a neat concept and a nice little social experiment to show that humans will put value on the most useless things. As always I'm wary of things that create money from nothing.

I guess you could argue this of most currencies, given the inability to effectively back them. Being that 3M Americans own cryptocurrency, ICOs now sell out in seconds, and that more vendors are accepting them, they appear to have escaped the proverbial lab. No one should fault you for being wary, but I suspect a tipping point has not yet been reached.

Usually they arise from a bartering system, like BAT: Basic Attention Token. The agreement is that the token are worth viewers, and we exchange them in the asvertising marketplace. How those services are viewed relative to other marketplaces is how we determine currency-to-currency exchange rates. The reason Bitvoin and Etherum are so important is that they provide a global currency, through which other currencies can flow. It's similar to nations that have local and national currency exhanges.

I don't know much about them, but aren't they still reliant on actual currency? You can sell and buy bitcoins only because there are those who are willing to trade American dollars for them, I think?

Most of the monetary value that lies in Bitcoin is still mostly speculative value, ie. people are paying out the ass to buy bitcoin, in the hope of making their money back by selling it later. This shows it is still an immature currency, and there are a lot of growing pains to be had before it can be used in the mainstream.

EDIT: Though really, the rise of quantum computing and it's potential for decrypting things exponentially faster than normal computers makes me worried that anything reliant on current cryptography is in jeopardy.

it's dotcom en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble 2.0. cryptocurrencys might become important sometime in the future but in their current state they are mainly good for speculation, money laundring and other illegal activities. wouldn't even be surprised if terrorism is linked to bitcoin somehow. therefore not supporting it.