Chained Melody

Just as Seiya didn't arrive alone, neither did bitcoins. The appearance of the Pegasus knight was a brilliant excuse for the bronze knights to storm the sanctuary. Bitcoin's irruption into the market brought along a Trojan horse: blockchain technology. And being open source, it allowed several networks to emulate it, giving birth to a cryptocurrency movement. A group of London-based researchers estimates that since 2013, 1,469 have appeared, of which at least 600 remain active with daily transactions.

Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Dash, and Monero, the five that follow Bitcoin in importance, have already captured 20 percent of the market share. Ethereum, for example, uses blockchain technology to create applications. Its creators explain that just as email was one of the uses of the internet, Bitcoin is only one of the possible ways to use blockchain.

Ripple is focused on payment systems for large corporations. Banco Santander already includes it in some of its operations. Litecoin is a faster, lighter, and cheaper version of Bitcoin. Dash claims to have the capacity for instant and private transactions. Meanwhile, Monero says its mining system is more transparent and avoids the intrinsic centralization of Bitcoin's architecture.

This article was originally published in Pagina/12 on August 10, 2017.