In recent years, Bitcoin's cryptocurrency has grown at a fantastic rate. After the initial sarcasm, investors and large media around the world suddenly began to approve investments in Bitcoin as well as other cryptocurrencies.

If you bought Bitcoin six years ago at the same price of $ 6.7 today, your earnings would be impressive!

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If you are interested in investing in cryptocurrencies, now is a good time for it. Bitcoin is in dire straits and also a number of other digital currencies are becoming more and more popular around the world. There are many reasons to invest in digital currencies and high profits are certainly the most important. The high volatility of digital currencies is an opportunity to earn big profits. That high volatility of the currency also poses a great risk to your investment.

All those who choose to buy cryptocurrency will find themselves in a problem that they do not know where to start. Sites such as Coinbase, Bitstamp, Cryptsy and BitPanda allow users to easily buy, hold or sell the major cryptocurrency.

What we need to emphasize is that it is extremely important to check the sites you use before any purchase or sale of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency Wallets?

There are several different online wallets, some allow you to store only one type of digital currency in them, while others allow you to store different types of digital currencies in them. Each crypto-exchange site offers you a wallet that can be downloaded. The wallet comes with a unique wallet address that you will use to receive digital waves from other people.

How to buy a cryptocurrency on a exchange websites?

The best way to buy and sell cryptocurrency is through exchange sites. You need to open an account on a reliable website and download a wallet and then select a payment method for transferring funds to a digital currency seller, such as a credit card or a transfer from a bank account. After you transferred funds to your online account it remains to select the currency you want to buy.

The price of cryptocurrency can vary on different sites. The time required for a transaction depends on your price (you have the option to offer the price you want to buy) and the types of cryptocurrency you want to buy. It can take a few seconds or few minutes.

Once the currency exchange system on site finds a seller who fits your price, the cryptocurrency will be sent to your wallet and money to the seller.

Other ways to purchase cryptocurrencies

One way of buying cryptocurrencies is through the online community. The price on the forums is similar or slightly lower than the price on the currencies exchange web sites. Once you have found and agreed with the seller, it remains to exchange wallets addresses to receive the cryptocurrency and seller the money. Now, it should be said that this is a very risky way of buying because it may happen that the seller after you pay him decide to not send you the cryptocurrency.

10 most valuable cryptocurrencies

In this article, I will present you some of the most valuable cryptocurrencies in market capitalization.

Bitcoin - Cryptocurrency Bitcoin debuted in 2008 and was presented by a person using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto in a scientific paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

The current market capitalization of Bitcoin is 38.4 billions, its current price is $2340.47 and in circulation are 16.4 millions Bitcoin.

In the past few months Bitcoin gained more media attention than 2013 when interest for Bitcoin peaked. Media companies and investment firms in South Korea, India, Australia and Japan have opened the issue of Bitcoin as reserve currency in the future, but also as an alternative monetary and financial system. According to them, if it maintains its current exponential growth, Bitcoin could in the next 10 years become a reserve currency (instead of the US dollar) in many countries.

Over the past two years, Bitcoin has changed the image of itself as a dangerous, illegal currency used by criminals who want to hide and wash their dirty money. The image of Bitcoin has changed drastically because of the rapid increase in investment in this cryptocurrency and its global acceptance and adoption.

An increasing number of investors and users have begun to realize that the transparent nature of Bitcoin prevents the cryptocurrency from being completely anonymous, which will say that Bitcoin transactions can be tracked!

Japan is probably the leading country in terms of adopting Bitcoin. Leading airlines, electronic device dealers and some of the country's most famous and influential companies accept Bitcoin as a digital currency. If this trend of adopting Bitcoin by Japanese companies continues, soon more than 300.000 Japanese traders should accept Bitcoin as the official form of payment.

What should be noted is that Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency you could find out there. The second most valuable digital currency is Ethereum. Although the value of Bitcoin doubled in 2017 the value of Ethereum jumped by a staggering 2.000 %.

Ethereum - Ethereum debuted in mid-2015. Its current market capitalization is around 20 billion dollars, the current price is $205.27 and in circulation are 93.2 millions of Ethereums.

Ethereum is a decentralized platform for smart contracts, applications that work just as they are programmed, with no possibility of any delay, censorship, fraud or interference by a third party.

Superbly, Ethereum and Bitcoin have a lot of similarities. Both cryptocurrencies use "blockchain" technology, decentralized public records of all transactions that are at the core of the security functions of both cryptocurrencies. However, if we scratch a little on the surface we will notice that these two cryptocurrencies are completely different in terms of design and use.

Bitcoin primarily serves as a currency for payments while Ethereum blockchain is designed to provide many more features that would benefit the businesses. Interest of corporations has attracted Ethereum primary features, support for "smart contracts".

Smart contracts are computer algorithms that automatically execute the terms of the contract as soon as the conditions are fulfilled. For example, on the Ethereum platform you can host a crowdfunding campaign or any kind of "smart deal".

Ethereum's goal is to decentralize the Internet and must admit that at least for now, it has a very good chance of becoming a "new Internet", but literally. The Ethereum platform could one day replace many of the technologies and ways we now use to host and execute the code online.

What also needs to be known is that large corporations, including JPMorgan, Microsoft and Intel, are formed the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a network to connect large companies working on projects with Ethereum Blockchain.

The market capitalization of Bitcoin is 38 billion dollars, almost double the value of Ethereum. However, many investors see the enormous potential and power of corporate engagement with Ethereum and the opportunities provided by smart contracts.

Ripple - Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) or Ripple protocol was built on a distributed open-source Internet protocol and a source currency called XRP (ripples). Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system (RTGS), currency exchange and remittance network created by Arthur Britto, David Schwartz and Ryan Fugger, released 2012.

Ripple has created its way into the banking system by offering secure, instant and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks. Basically, you don’t have to wait anymore between 1-2 days to receive money from someone in your bank account if the bank of the sender and the receiver uses ripple protocol. Instead, it will be done within minutes and the security is also higher than working with multiple intermediaries.

Used by companies such as UniCredit, UBS and Santander, the Ripple protocol has been increasingly adopted by banks and payment networks as settlement infrastructure technology, with American Banker explaining that "from banks perspective, distributed ledgers like the Ripple system have a number of advantages over cryptocurrencies like bitcoin," including price and security. It's market capitalization is 7.5 billion dolarrs, it's current price is $0.196611 and in circulation are slightly more than 38 billions.

Litecoin - Charles Lee, a former Google employee, presented Litecoin at the end of 2011. Litecoin is a P2P cryptocurrency that allows instant and almost free payments to everyone in the world. Litecoin is a open-source a global payment network that is fully decentralized. Although technically nearly identical to Bitcoin, Litecoin nevertheless brings some technical improvements such as increasing the amount of transactions that can be processed at a certain time, which affects the reduction of potential bottlenecks. Litecoin also has almost zero payment cost and facilitates payments approximately four times faster than Bitcoin.

Its market capitalization is 2.3 billion dollars, it's current price is $45.49 , and in circulation are around 52 million litecoins.

Ethereum Classic - Ethereum Classic is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

Ethereum Classic is a continuation of the original Ethereum blockchain - the classic version preserving untampered history; free from external interference and subjective tampering of transactions.

Ethereum Classic has a market capitalization of 1.7 billion euros, it's current price is $18.37 and in circulation is slightly less than 93 million units of the digital currency.

NEM - NEM is a peer-to-peer crypto-currency and blockchain platform launched in early 2015. NEM introduces new features in blockchain technology such as its proof-of-importance (POI) algorithm, multisignature accounts, encrypted messaging and an Eigentrust++ reputation system.

Its market capitalization amounts to almost 1.1 billion dollars, it's current price is $0.122296 and in circulation are 9 billion NEM.

Dash - Dash (formerly known as Darkcoin and XCoin) is an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that offers all the same features as Bitcoin but also has advanced capabilities, including instant transactions (InstantSend), private transactions (PrivateSend) and decentralized governance (DGBB). Dash's decentralized governance and budgeting system makes it the first decentralized autonomous organization.

Dash uses a two-tier architecture to power its network. The first tier consists of miners who secure the network and write transactions to the blockchain. The second tier consists of masternodes which enable the advanced features of Dash.

Dash market capitalization is 1.2 billion dollars, the current price is $167.97 and in circulation are 7.3 million Dashs.

IOTA - It's the first crypto-currency that does not use blockchain technology. IOTA uses "Tangle", which is based on DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) technology that provides a variety of functions like cost-free transactions, endless scalability or offline transactions.

In a traditional blockchain, various transactions are bundled in each block before this bundle of transactions is verified by miners. In the Tangle, every single transaction forms a new block and is essentially verified by itself: In order to successfully conduct a transaction, you first have to verify two randomly chosen transactions is the network.

Market capitalization is slightly above 567 million dollars, it's current price is $0.204110 , while in circulation are slightly more than 2.7 billion units of this digital currency.

BitShares - BitShares is a cryptocurrency and financial blockchain smart contracts platform. Founded by Daniel Larimer in the fall of 2013, BitShares has a three-second blocktime, which is as fast as you can send a transmission from the far side of the planet and still get included into the current block. There are also some unrivaled features like a decentralized exchange built into its wallet client, human-readable named addresses, the ability to issue your own crypto-assets to other wallet holders and trade them in the exchange, and an interesting governance model with user voting.

BitShares market capitalization is 332 million dollars, the current price is $0.127957 , and in circulation are 2.6 billion units of this crypto-currency.

Monero - Monero is a open-source crypto-currency created in mid-2014 with a focus on privacy, decentralization and scalability. Unlike many crypto-currencies who are basically a clone of the original Bitcoin code, Monero uses the CryptoNote protocol, which was originally used by Bytecoin (the crypto-currency derived from Monero).

Conceptually, the CryptoNote protocol is the evolution of the idea behind Bitcoin, both crypto-currencies are somehow similar but still so different. The main difference between the two technologies is that it is significantly more difficult to monitor the digital currencies that are based on the CryptoNote protocol than all those that in some way represent the clone of Bitcoin code.

Since the CryptoNote code is not derived from Bitcoin code, there is a significant difference in internal algorithms, such as recalculations of a new level of weight or a new block size.

Monero market capitalization is 553 million dollars, the current price is $37.44, and in circulation are 14.7 billion units of this crypto-currency.

There is many more other cryptocurrencies that you could find out there. Site like coinmarketcap.com is good place to start.

Caution when investing in digital currencies

It is very important to think carefully before investing in digital currencies. There are many reasons to invest in digital currencies, but there are also a lot of reasons to be very careful whit this. Namely, according to the 2013 survey, 45% of the online exchange market for digital currencies has collapsed along with money from customers! It looks much better now, but it is worth to know to be very careful.

Famous investor Warren Buffett also warns about investing in crypto-currencies, citing the danger that this overflowing balloon could blown.

Either way, crypto-currencies offer a huge opportunity for profit. The current trend of growth for the most popular crypto-currency is phenomenal. Think about being a part of the trend!