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Meanwhile, the mother of all crypto currencies is well known. But what other digital currencies are there and what does it matter?
BITCOIN, CRYPTOCURRENCY, ETHEREUM, BLOCK CHAIN, RIPPLE, IOTA
Ever since the crypto-currency Bitcoin rushed from one record high to the next and recently broke through the $ 10,000 mark for the first time, the digital currency is on everyone's lips. But technologically speaking, Bitcoin is not necessarily the last word in wisdom. Other cryptocurrencies are far more promising than Bitcoin itself with their more sophisticated technologies and flexible applications.

While Bitcoin is merely designed to send transactions from A to B, the business of other coins is much more differentiated. Most companies and developers promise to revolutionize one industry after another. Others, with their blockchain variants, want to enable business fields or help them to make a breakthrough. 

However, it is difficult to keep track of the many different coins. Coinmarketcap currently lists 1326 cryptocurrencies traded on 6906 marketplaces.
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Ethereum
Like Bitcoin,  Ethereum is based on blockchain technology. This means that even with Ethereum the data is not stored on central servers, but cryptographically verified on the networked computers of the participants. However, the technical foundation on which Ethereum is based is much more mature and extensive than Bitcoin's. This makes Ethereum far more than just a digital currency.

The Ethereum founders around the Canadian-Russian programmer Vitalik Buterin see in their blockchain the future of the Internet, an Art Web 3.0. without servers with decentralized applications, so-called dApps . The Ethereum open source platform makes messaging and social networking applications just as possible as financial applications or micro-payments.

An exciting use case for Ethereum is so-called Smart Contracts . Contracts between two parties over the block chain are concluded and deposited in a public, decentralized manner. The Blockchain becomes a notary and blesses shops.

Smart Contracts
If-Then loops can be used to create arbitrary constellations of smart contracts. A simple example: someone has solar cells on the roof of his house and produces excess energy worth X, which is fed into the grid. A neighbor needs energy equal to X at that exact moment. When surplus energy is fed in, and when someone gets that energy, money flows as long as the energy is used / injected. Now building up the energy management on the Blockchain, the business between the two neighbors can be completed directly by means of smart contracts without middlemen. The billing of this business would then not have to take over the network operator and issue invoices to the two parties,

This example can be applied to any number of applications. For example in the video or music streaming sector, when charging e-cars, in video games or in leases.

scalability 
If you continue the thought game of Smart Contracts and other decentralized Ethereum applications, the platform must be able to handle millions of users and their requests in near real time. And this is where the big challenge of blockchain technologies lies: scalability .

Visa can bless up to 24,000 transactions per second, while Ethereum can currently handle a good dozen per second. Of course, the developers are aware of this and work on corresponding solutions. But for the long-term and sustainable implementation of such blockchain-based mass applications, the focus is usually on the question of scalability. It is also unclear how the matter of transaction fees incurred by Ethereum will be regulated in the future.

Ethereum is currently trading at over $ 510. Since June 2017, its value has been constantly moving between $ 240 and $ 350. In the long term, Ethereum is credited with much more potential than Bitcoin, as the Ethereum platform is much more flexible than Bitcoin technology.
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ripple
The application possibilities of the blockchain variant developed by the US company Ripple are as numerous as different. Specializing has ripple on payment protocols for banks . It is intended to revolutionize the way banks handle payments between each other, as the legalization of payments is done decentrally by the blockchain. This sends Ripple to replace the internationally accepted payment protocol SWIFT.

Banks around the world connect their systems to the SWIFT network and receive instructions or inquiries about payments and transfers. In response to technologies such as Ripple, the SWIFT consortium has launched the Global Payments Innovation (gpi) initiative. This will make international inter-bank payments faster, safer and more reliable.

Ripple instead of SWIFT
The transaction traffic of more than 10,000 banks worldwide is currently handled in a standardized manner via the SWIFT network. The implementation of the newer SWIFT standard is slow, as more and more banks discover ripple for themselves. With more than a hundred banks, Ripple has now partnered or experimented with dozens of banks using ripple technology.

With Ripple's funds being much faster, cheaper and safer than SWIFT's, Ripple is predicted to have a golden future.

The Coin (XRP), which is issued by the company Ripple, serves as a counterpart to the transfers. In terms of market capitalization, XRP is currently ranked fourth with a total value of $ 670 million. The XRP price is currently around $ 0.28
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IOTA
Transactions cost money - at least for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Miners who spend the processing power on the blockchain can also cost their services. In addition, the scalability problem of most blockchain technologies is also seen as an obstacle to mass applications.

This is exactly where IOTA comes in with its technology: the Tangle . Tangle does not need miners, has no fees and neither blocks nor chains. But Tangle is decentralized, tamper-proof, and uses something similar to hashes to authenticate transactions. The IOTA technology should also be safe from quantum computers and should even be able to be used offline. And last but not least, it's scalable.

No blockchain
The Tangle technology is said to be so lightweight that even smaller computers, such as cars, smartphones, drones, laptops or other networked devices can handle transactions.

Tangle is mainly used in the Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communication. Because this is where blockchain technology could reach its limits if it were suddenly used by millions of networked devices.

With the blockchain, only one transaction after the other can be performed. Because Tangle's verification is different than Blockchain, multiple transactions can be performed and validated at the same time.

Blockchain checks the transactions of miners. At Tangle, that happens over the Web; an indirect, network-like association of all participants. This is a major advantage, especially for micro-payments in the IoT.

Increased strongly
Since its mid-year issue, the IOTA coin has typically fluctuated between $ 0.4 and $ 0.8. Since this week it became known that IOTA has agreed to collaborate with Microsoft, Fujitsu, Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Accenture and PwC for the development of a  data marketplace for the Internet of Things , the value of the coin is now rising sharply at around 1 , $ 5 traded.