Altcoins

After the release of Bitcoin, there has always been a large community supporting cryptocurrencies. Also, since Bitcoin and blockchain are open source, a lot of people within the community started to create their cryptocurrencies offering similar services that provide different consensus methods and so on, in comparison to Bitcoin.

Since Bitcoin is the first and, by far, most dominant cryptocurrency, all other cryptocurrencies are known as Alternative Coins or Altcoins. The first Altcoin was Namecoin, introduced in 2011. After that, a lot of Altcoins have been introduced; a few of them were popular and also started to be used as mainstream coins, whereas others were less popular. As of now, there are more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies in existence. There are two broad categories in the alternative cryptocurrency sphere. If an alternative blockchain platform is to be created...

Introducing Altcoins

There are more than 1,600 cryptocurrencies in circulation; each one of them provides an improvement or a modification over Bitcoins. There are various online exchanges where cryptocurrencies can be exchanged amongst one another or for fiat currencies (such as USD, EUR, GBP, and so on) too, similar to a currency exchange or a stock-exchange portal. Here is a list of some popular Altcoins:

• Litecoins
• Ethereum
• Zcash
• Dash
• Ripple
• Monero
• EOS
• IOTA
• TRON
• Tether
• Ethereum Classic
• Bitcoin Cash
• Stellar
• NEO
• NEM
• Cardano

There are two broad categories of Altcoin on the basis of their blockchain, since the blockchain defines features, security, and other aspects of the coin.

It is certain that having so many cryptocurrencies in the market, along with currency exchanges, means that, now, a lot of key financial and market metrics are required to differentiate among the coins...

Alternative currency

Apart from tokens, which are built on top of existing blockchains, there are various alt currencies fueled by either having their own blockchain and/or any other improvement or differentiating factor.

Here are some of the factors that have been modified on the Altcoins, when compared to Bitcoins:

• Monetary alternatives
• Consensus alternatives

We will discuss each of these alternatives in detail, and then afterward we will discuss some of the widely used Altcoins and what modifications they have over Bitcoins.

Monetary alternatives

Bitcoin is limited to 21 million coins, and it has a declining issuance rate, including a 10-minute block generation time, which takes lot of confirmation time; it also takes...

Acquiring cryptocurrency

There are various ways in which Altcoins or Bitcoins can be obtained; if the coin supports mining, primarily the coins that work on PoW algorithms fall into this category, those coins can be obtained by a mining process. Coins such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, and others support mining. As discussed earlier, there are various exchanges where cryptocurrencies are exchanged, for fiat currency, or even other cryptocurrency; this is another widely used method.

Mining of cryptocurrency

Mining is a process by which new blocks are added to the blockchain. Transactions are validated by the mining process by mining nodes and kept in the blocks, then these blocks are added to the blockchain...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed alternative currency and the difference between a coin and a token. We discussed in detail the various platforms, based on which platforms can be created. Furthermore, we discussed various alternatives that Altcoins provide over Bitcoins. We read in detail about currencies such as Litecoin, Ether, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash.

We also discussed acquiring a cryptocurrency and the various ways to do so. We read about mining a cryptocurrency and the differences between Bitcoin and Altcoins, in terms of mining. We discussed exchanges and how we can store Altcoins other than Bitcoins in wallets. We also learned about the difficulty of re-targeting an algorithm in Bitcoin.