Mining is integral to the security of Proof of Work blockchains. By computing hashes with certain properties, participants are able to secure cryptocurrency networks without the need for a central authority. When Bitcoin first launched in 2009, anyone with a regular PC could compete with other miners to guess a valid hash for the next block. That’s because the mining difficulty was low. There wasn’t much hash rate on the network. As such, you didn’t need specialized hardware to add new blocks to the blockchain.

Liquidity is the measure of how easily you can convert an asset into cash or another asset. You may have the rarest, most valuable old book in your backpack, but if you're alone on a remote island, it will be difficult to find a buyer. On the other hand, if you'd like to buy $100 USD of BTC on the BTC/USDT pair on Binance, you'll be able to do it almost instantly without any impact on price. This is why liquidity is important when it comes to financial assets.

It doesn’t make much sense to lend money for free. If Alice wants to borrow $10,000 from Bob, Bob will need a financial incentive to loan it to her. That incentive comes in the form of interest – a kind of fee that gets added on top of the amount Alice borrows.

Balancing a crypto portfolio is not that different from balancing a traditional portfolio. You can easily reduce your overall risk according to your profile and investment strategy. All it takes to get started is simply diversifying your investments among different cryptocurrencies.

A blockchain’s consensus mechanism serves to ensure that there is agreement among participants on the current state of the blockchain. The consensus mechanism determines who is able to add new blocks of transactions, and one of its primary aims is to ensure that the chain is not re-written.

Waves network operates on a leased proof-of-stake (LPoS) consensus algorithm combined with the Waves-NG protocol, allowing for a high degree of scalability and transaction throughput.

When you’re prompted to update your digital banking app on your smartphone, you probably don’t even think twice. Maybe your phone auto-updates without you even noticing. It’s a necessary process, after all – if you don’t install the latest version of the software, you run the risk of being denied access to its services.