Cryptocurrency can be a bit of a confusing concept to get at 1st, not to mention once you get interested, how confusing certain aspects are when you're really on a roll and need to know as much as you can about altcoins or bitcoin and even the blockchain. We want to keep you safe though, so why not check out our scam prevention page that tries and steers you away from being ripped off a number of ways. We also have help using altcoin exchanges and help understanding mining pools, did you know there are exchanges that trade mining contracts? If you're completely new to altcoins and bitcoin but want to digest as much info you can, then you should check out our New? section for a quick introduction and free classes on cryptocurrency and it's use.
First off, understand how altcoins work, below we will layout a deeper look, to help you with altcoin functionality. If we were to disect an altcoin, we could be able to do so as follows:
- Altcoin Blockchain - Is the center of the whole altcoin, ( unless you count the source code ), this is where all the transactions, onced mined into blocks, are stored, into the chain, it is possible to scan this blockchain, using the specific altcoin's blockexplorer, to find any transaction that has taken place, by a series of variables, minus any info that could indentify someone, unless they had an address saved online.
- Altcoin Miner - Used as the number crunching 3rd party, that literally, solves math problems for each transaction, that in turn mines the transactions together from other miners, into altcoin blocks and allows for all transactions to be sent, once that block is formed, it's added to the blockchain.
- Altcoin Wallet - Used to display and allow the user to interact with the altcoin's blockchain, this is where you will have your wallet address, which is your personal money code that people can use to send altcoins to you.
- Altcoin Node - Needed to keep the altcoin's blockchain decentralized and backuped, so miner's and user's transactions can take place on a public ledger with various counts of comparison for accuracy.