1/15 What is Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) and what makes it superior to most other cryptocurrencies?

A thread (3-4 minute read).

2/15 First, consensus. Imagine a group of people in a room needing to share information with everyone else. You could take turns having each person tell everyone what they need to know one at a time. This is how most databases work. It's effective, but slow.

3/15 Instead, each person could simultaneously pick 2 other people to share info with, and then those people could pick 2 people to share it with and so on (w/o sharing w/anyone that's already heard it). This is incredibly fast, and how the hashgraph Gossip Protocol works.

4/15 The Gossip Protocol allows the Hedera Hashgraph public ledger to achieve speeds of 10,000+ transactions per second (TPS), making HBAR one of the fastest (if not *the* fastest) cryptocurrency in existence today. However, speed is only one of the many advantages of Hashgraph.

5/15 Once the information is distributed, it needs to be ordered. Hashgraph achieves this by putting 2 pieces of information (hashes) onto each transaction that allows the receiving node to track where each transaction came from. This is called "Gossip about Gossip".

6/15 Using those two tiny hashes, the nodes all run the same virtual "voting" algorithm on the data they have received. This algorithm tells each node how to sort the transactions so all nodes have all transactions in the same order, preventing the double-spend problem.

7/15 Hedera Hashgraph achieves transaction finality in 3-5 seconds, ranking it among the fastest cryptocurrencies. It's also very inexpensive, with transaction fees being a fixed USD cost. No matter the price of HBAR, the fee remains the same (currently $0.0001 USD).

8/15 Hashgraph has top shelf security, using Asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (ABFT). There's currently no better known security algorithm, making hashgraph resistant to bot-net attacks (DDoS) and Sybil attacks. 1/3rd of nodes have to be compromised for attacks to succeed.

9/15 Hashgraph also brings the unique concept of "fairness" to crypto, providing mathematically provable fair access and fair ordering that cannot be influenced to give any client an advantage (or disadvantage) over any other. Incredibly important for democratizing finance.

10/15 HBAR is the native cryptocurrency of the Hedera public network. HBARs are used to power decentralized applications and protect the network from malicious actors. Network fees are paid in HBAR.

11/15 Hedera’s proof-of-stake public network uses HBARs, which are staked to a node to weight votes on transactions for consensus. Weighted voting makes it difficult/expensive for bad actors to maliciously affect consensus, requiring over one-third of total HBAR supply.

12/15 The HBAR blockchain makes it easy to build apps w/hashgraph consensus to reap its advantages. It provides access to its Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) API and recently released the Hedera Token Service (HTS) API which makes it easy to issue your own tokens on the network.

13/15 There are currently 500+ teams working with Hedera ranging from startups to global enterprises. Hedera's governing counsel includes companies like Google, IBM, LG, Boeing as well as international universities and corporations. Its counsel is geopolitically diverse.

14/15 In a recent webinar for their new Token Service, Hedera's founder Dr. Leemon Baird stated that Hedera's goal is to "tokenize everything". In a talk 3 years ago he stated Hedera was like Google's search engine but wanting to become like ABC Corp, all things blockchain.

15/15 SUMMARY: 10,000+ TPS + 3-5 second settlement make Hedera Hashgraph insanely fast. It uses ABFT, the world's best security algorithm. It enforces fairness, uses HBAR for transaction fees ($0.0001 atm) and is counseled by world-class institutions. IMO, insanely undervalued.

EXCHANGES OFFERING HBAR. (USA exchanges include Bittrex and BinanceUS)

HBAR RESOURCE 1/3: For an 80 minute intro w/o too much "geek speak", listen to this video presentation by Dr. Baird at Harvard

HBAR RESOURCE 2/3: To learn about Hedera's Token Service, watch this 30 minute webinar.

HBAR RESOURCE 3/3: Finally, visit http://Hedera.com  for more details about the governing counsel, for API docs and answers to more specific questions.

For more "plain English" explainer threads, see my "thread of threads": https://twitter.com/xrpartisan/status/1347653134504652801

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