What are cryptocurrencies?

Cryptocurrencies are the newest form of digital currency. Imagine a peer to peer transfer without the interaction from any 3^rd party. This means you can go to any store, purchase anything and no one will know what you purchased. It is not anonymous so the amount will be shown. The seller and the buyer are pseudonymous so they're not completely unknown. Just like foreign exchanges, digital currency can be traded too and many people are day trading cryptocurrencies. It's definitely a volatile market so being able to swing trade and doing it quick is a very big factor. The entire cryptocurrency market cap is just over $200 billion currently. One common mistake I see is that people mix up virtual and digital currency. Digital currency is money in the digital form whereas virtual currencies are usually tokens purchased with real money that can only be spent inside a virtual world. For example, NBA 2k17, a very popular basketball game that is available on PlayStation and XBOX uses its own virtual currency that people purchase with real money. You can use these tokens inside the game to purchase different shoes, apparels or skills for your players.

Top 3 Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin – Bitcoin is no doubt the biggest and baddest of all cryptos and this is mainly because it was the first of its kind. It came out in 2008 and has been making crazy gains since then. At one point when it came out, it was hovering around .6 cents USD. It jumped up to $1,000 per Bitcoin at the beginning of 2017 and has since risen to around $7400 at the time of writing this article with a $122million market cap.

Ethereum – Ethereum is the next one up with the second biggest market cap at $30 billion and current price of one eth at $313. Ethereum is a platform to help companies getting on the blockchain so it has huge potential.

Litecoin – Litecoin does not have the third biggest market cap but it definitely is one of the longest standing along with an impressive record. It has jumped up 2000% this year and it has a $3.4billion dollar market cap at $62.74 per Litecoin. It is known as more of a stable coin so there isn't many chances to make good money swing trading.