all right, in this video, we're going to discuss a brief history of crypto.
now this is important to understand where crypto kind of started and where it's heading.
obviously not entirely important for the overall core content of this course, but it's good to know.
to really understand crypto, you need to take a look back and how it started and where is it at today.
you're probably very familiar with crypto.
you're taking this course right now, so you have some interest in it.
but let's see how it sort of 1st began.
crypto as a concept, electronic cash systems as a whole really started in the 1980s.
things like debit cards and credit cards kind of count towards electronic cash systems as well, although those came a bit before.
and then bitcoin, obviously the most popular cryptocurrency was 1st created around 2008 by an anonymous user satoshi nakamoto.
and nobody to this day knows who satoshi nakamoto was, whether it was a single person or a group, but they do currently hold in their wallet a lot of bitcoin that has never been released.
and that sort of started the gold rush as it were for crypto.
the genesis block of bitcoin itself was mined in 2009. and new coins started to follow several years later.
litecoin comes out, ripple, xrp, ethereum.
and of those three, you're probably most familiar with ethereum becoming one of the most popular due to its flexibility, smart contracts, and more.
and in 2014, one of the ones we will get familiar with in this course is monero.
it was a fork of the original coin bytecoin.
and it really focuses on privacy 1st features compared to bitcoin, ethereum, which don't focus on privacy so much as usability, while monero kind of balances both.
and from 2016 onward, initial coin offerings or icos became really popular and you see the large rise in sort of scams related to crypto coins.
the most recent one as of recording this course is the most popular hawk to a coin, a classic rug pool, much like many other icos.
so it's best to stay with the tried and true coins like bitcoin, ethereum, monero.
new coins generally should be seen as extremely risky unless you're confident in the underlying technology, you're investing in what they're building, rather than just trying to make some money.
but that is a brief history of crypto just to cover our basics.
so you understand sort of the path where we got to crypto today with bitcoin really being the one that paved the way.
and one of the most popular ones used when it comes to scams, ransomware, the dark web, or just any crypto.
it's one of the most popular ones.
but monero is the more privacy focused one.
and we'll be handling a lot of discussion around monero throughout this course.
in the next one, we'll talk about how blockchains actually work at a fundamental level, and then we'll keep diving into the technology of crypto to understand them better.