2. Paul Samuelson, "An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money," Journal of Political Economy, vol. LXVI (December 1958): 467–482. Return to text What are the risks of investing in crypto? Mymoney.gov
The first decentralized cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, which was first released as open-source software in 2009. As of March 2022, there were more than 9,000 other cryptocurrencies in the marketplace, of which more than 70 had a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion. Largest cryptocurrencies by market cap Unlike traditional currencies, cryptocurrencies exist only as a shared digital record of ownership, stored on a blockchain. When a user wants to send cryptocurrency units to another user, they send it to that user’s digital wallet. The transaction isn’t considered final until it has been verified and added to the blockchain through a process called mining. This is also how new cryptocurrency tokens are usually created.