How do cryptocurrencies work?

Why were they made?

"bitcoin was made in response to the 2008 financial crisis thing, to not having to rely on the banking system
yet, nowadays the cryptomarket inherited all of the flaws from that legacy financial system
(centralized exchanges reliance for the whole market/bitcoin as a whole type thing)"

how were they made?

blockchain technology
block explorers for bitcoin should be easy to understand, people that use the coin to transact with it, those transactions are included in a "block" that has to be mined then miners mine the block on top of the previous block, validating those transaction and creating a chain of blocks by stacking those blocks on top of eachothers, which that chain of blocks is where the history of those transactions is

by who?

cryptographers

@Bukkit blocks get chained together snd these blocks are not able to be unchained, blocks store the transactions happened in a certain amount of time

@Bukkit
This is the legendary bitcoin whitepaper.
Start here.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

@Nebuchadnezzar_II Thanks! I'll definitely take a look at it in my free time :D

@gangar Wow. So a small amount of people could profit off your transactions? this is cool 😂

@Bukkit
kinda yea, when you make a transaction you pay a network fee, that fee is what the miners are getting paid with to keep the financial incentive for them to mine and keep securing the network that way
well, they getting paid with transaction fees + block reward, a block comes with it's own reward as well, for monero block reward now is 0.6 XMR per block
so in the case of monero, getting paid the transaction fees + 0.6 XMR if mining a whole block
else if pool mining then the 0.6 XMR is shared and split between everyone that contributed for the pool to mine that block