altcoin Concepts

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency

by Ian Demartino · 2 Feb 2016 · 296pp · 86,610 words

Bitcoin with a Bank Account, Cash, or PayPal Chapter 11: Working for Bitcoin Chapter 12: Mining Chapter 13: HODL! Chapter 14: Day Trading Chapter 15: Altcoin Trading and Pump-and-Dumps Chapter 16: Peer-to-Peer Lending Chapter 17: Investing in Other Commodities Using Bitcoin SECTION III: WHAT CAN BITCOIN DO

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FOR ME? Chapter 18: Remittance Chapter 19: Microtransactions Chapter 20: Start-up Funding SECTION IV: THE FUTURE OF BITCOIN Chapter 21: Altcoins and Bitcoin 2.0 Projects Chapter 22: Distributed Autonomous Corporations, Governance, and Niche Economies Index Foreword This is my first book, so I can’t

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or piece of software that allows users to observe and follow Bitcoin transactions through the blockchain. Can also be used to describe similar systems for altcoins’ blockchains. CGMiner: The most popular Bitcoin-mining software. cold wallet: A wallet on a computer or storage disk that is not connected to the Internet

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be modified by the public. paper wallet: Your private or public key, printed out or written on a piece of paper. pre-mine: When some altcoins are created for the first time, the creators will sometimes generate a number of coins before the network is turned on and people are able

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be discussed in a later chapter, are digital currencies that are separate from Bitcoin and have their own public ledger. A user could buy some altcoins on an exchange, move them out of the exchange into their own wallet not controlled by the exchange, then move them back onto a different

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someone your private key, you essentially give them the ability to use it as they please. • Pump-and-dumps happen all the time in the altcoin space. Every announcement by a coin’s development team or community has to be taken with a grain of salt. Their motives are not always

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money when they sell the coins after the price increase. Beyond that, there are groups out there—independent of coin developers—that will find an altcoin with a small enough volume that their group’s total wealth can move the market by itself, simply by buying up relatively small amounts over

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in paper wallets, make sure you don’t keep all of them in the same place. Physical robbery and potential damage are still a risk. • Altcoins are a shitshow. That is not to say that they are all scams or that even a majority of them are. It is just that

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there are far too many for the market to support. At least 95 percent of even the good altcoins will fail. A few from the current crop will make it to the next stage of cryptocurrency history, but most will die on the vine

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course, the next usually follows. After running through a few candidates, the company and community eventually settled on the name Paycoin and the arguably largest altcoin-run scam to date was kicked off. Although leaked emails obtained through an SEC investigation all but confirm the accusations below, for legal purposes it

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this writing, it is $0.05. This is a far cry from its promised $20 price floor but still sits above many legitimate and useful altcoins, which just shows that some people are willing to hold onto an investment—even one proven to be worthless—if they paid a lot for

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anywhere. Paycoin won’t ever be the future or even a significant player in the cryptocurrency scene. It will toil in the depths of the altcoin world until everyone involved finally gives up or gets bored. People paid a lot of money for Paycoin. So much so that selling at $5

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humorous misspelling of “HOLD”) is a good strategy when investing long-term in Bitcoin, holding the whole way down is not a viable strategy for altcoins that can lose nearly all their value quickly with no hope of recovery when controversy strikes. Bitcoin is full of scams. That doesn’t mean

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worth the time and effort. But that isn’t the only reason. Cryptocurrency day trading is ruthless. Outside of Bitcoin and a few other major altcoins and projects, nearly every other cryptocurrency has a horrible long-term outlook with the only potential profit to be grabbed by riding usually manufactured speculative

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companies, with large banks such as UBS and Barclays announcing experiments with the technology, but this is exceedingly rare.1 Only a small fraction of altcoins bring anything new to the table, only a fraction of those have shown long-term viability and only a fraction of those have demonstrated any

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. They don’t seem to have much interest in preventing insider trading, market manipulation, or the other hijinks that are common with the more obscure altcoins and in any unregulated security market. Much of the issue can be avoided by sticking strictly to Bitcoin and perhaps a few of the larger

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CPU or GPU by overworking it. This warning does not stem from an overabundance of caution. I myself used my PC to CPU-mine some altcoins for a story and my computer’s CPU has had overheating problems ever since. I’m not alone in that experience. Users can contribute by

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-focused coins such as Bitcoin, anyway). For those who are interested in the process (or for those who want to solo mine a CPU-focused altcoin), however, here is how it is done: Open or create a file called “Bitcoin.conf” in Notepad. You can find it in the programs folder

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Bitcoin miners profited from the increase in Bitcoin’s price more than the increase in hashing power; the same concept can be applied to altcoins. Like Bitcoin, most altcoins are secured through a proof-of-work method. There are three main algorithms that coins run, and hardware designed to work for one

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expensive but obsolete hardware out there and many of them are looking to point that hashing power at something. That is one reason why the altcoin-mining space is getting more competitive. SHA-256 ASICs that are no longer effective at mining Bitcoin can be pointed toward currencies with a smaller

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network and lower difficulty. The problem is that although that machine may be underpowered for the Bitcoin network, it can be extremely overpowered for smaller altcoins. This can and has led to the usually temporary centralization of mining operations for various coins. That has spread fears of a 51% attack occurring

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on these far less secure networks but no major accounts of such attacks have been reported so far. Another reason for the increase in altcoin-mining difficulty has been the rise of multipools. These mining pools will focus on all the coins of a certain algorithm (SHA-256, Scrypt, etc

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order to kick off the currency—then the next thing to look at is how likely the coin is to get on an exchange. Most altcoins see their biggest jump in value when they get on a major exchange and the public’s interest is at its highest. Typically, early miners

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sell their coins at this stage and it is rare that an altcoin reaches those initial heights ever again. Therefore, when looking for a coin to mine, a good tactic is to mine a coin without exchange support

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cheapest ways to obtain Bitcoin. Today, it is arguably the most difficult and expensive way. Mining, regardless of whether you are mining Bitcoin or an altcoin, takes time, electricity, and technical knowledge. Purchasing coins is far more effective than trying to create bitcoins out of electricity. Unless you have free electricity

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required reading if you plan to trade Bitcoin in any serious fashion is BitcoinWisdom.com. The website gives information on Bitcoin and all the major altcoins on all the major exchanges. In addition to order books, it also includes some basic tools useful for identifying trading opportunities. There are other sites

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- Fibonacci Retracements. Directed by Brian Beamish. Performed by Brian Beamish. Youtube.com/coinigy. April 25, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wj9ITc0444. Chapter 15: Altcoin Trading and Pump-and-Dumps Shame on you guys. You can’t advocate for Bitcoin and the transformative changes it enables while also pumping some

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alt-coin. —Blogger Matt Branton, The Branton Bits, April 7, 2014 The same strategies that apply to Bitcoin can be applied to altcoins; the principles are the same. However, altcoins—especially once you get past the top few in market-cap size—are more susceptible to pump-and-dump tactics. Pump-and

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to cryptocurrency. They have existed in the stock market and especially in off-market penny stocks that have low liquidity. The same pattern applies to altcoins. The lower the liquidity of the market (i.e., how many people are buying and selling), the easier pump-and-dump schemes are to pull

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on the wrong side of the pump. Traditionally, pump-and-dumps follow the same general pattern. First, a group of investors will quietly buy an altcoin without much liquidity while the price is low. Sometimes simply buying the coin in large amounts is enough to get the pump going, but in

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today and it hasn’t hit its peak yet. No one is going to “miss out” on being an early adopter for the next big altcoin because they didn’t buy it when it launched; there is plenty of time to invest. But a coin doesn’t necessarily need the name

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is rarely a reason to invest before that inevitable first dump unless you are one of the miners. I don’t particularly recommend chasing new altcoins looking for that next big payday. Either you will become a victim of a scam or you will invest in a well-meaning coin that

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has very little chance of becoming something sustainable. It’s a good idea to research some of the more established altcoins, decide which ones you feel have a chance to survive long-term, and then invest small amounts in those coins with an eye on the

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as you can get to a free lunch in investing. —Financial writer Barry Ritholtz Bitcoin doesn’t just allow users to invest in Bitcoin itself, altcoins and related services. It also opens up an entire world of investments to anyone with an Internet connection. Something I said toward the end of

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and bonds will also be traded on the blockchain. But the time when anything can be traded on the blockchain is not here yet. The altcoin Ripple has made the most headway in accomplishing this goal. It uses “trusted gateways” to allow users to buy commodities such as gold, as well

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not in the way, it would be possible to trade stocks using the blockchain. It probably will happen someday soon, either via Ripple or another altcoin, or Bitcoin itself. Non–Wall Street markets are becoming more popular every year. Eventually, cryptocurrencies could create a fully peer-to-peer stock market without

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sure that the digital currency revolution will be successful or that it will progress in a way that increases Bitcoin’s value. Investing in an altcoin, any altcoin, is at least twice as risky. The investor is betting that the digital currency revolution as a whole will be successful. But he or

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she is also betting that it will be successful enough to increase the value not only of Bitcoin but also his or her altcoin of choice. As is true in any speculative investment, investing isn’t always the same as believing. There is money to be made in

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-term holders of various coins, however, are betting that the coin developers and marketers will be able to stay afloat in the sea of other altcoins and offer enough unique features that people will choose it over Bitcoin. As Bitcoin became more popular, various developers decided to see if they could

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speculative trading and pump-and-dump tactics. They have no use in the long run and therefore are unlikely to survive. The problem is that altcoins are too easy to create. Ars Technica published an article on this topic. Its author, Cyrus Farivar, created and released a coin to illustrate the

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hats that would accompany usernames in the comments section of the website’s articles—but it was something. Instantly, Arscoin had three things very few altcoins manage to have: media attention, a community, and a use case. It lacked a few things as well, such as a competent developer staff, long

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who wanted decorative hats next to their names. Silly as it might sound, you could purchase the decorative hats only with Arscoins. Very few other altcoins can make the same claim. Even in the case of Bitcoin, there are few items or services other than the Dark Web markets that accept

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. This list might not make it sound as if Ripple is setting the world on fire, but it is still light-years ahead of most altcoins, which typically never even get a sniff of the fiat world. Dash/Dark Algorithm: X11 Mining Type: Proof-of-Work Block Time: 2.5 minutes

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more reach. Namecoin might yet find its use. Although many have written it off, I wouldn’t be so quick to do so. The combined altcoin market can’t support the market size it currently holds. There just aren’t enough currencies with useful functions or niches that Bitcoin can’t

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already fill. This is speculation, but I believe it to be sound: the altcoin market will continue to shrink until the mass of useless and insufficiently useful coins die off. What exactly “dying off” means hasn’t been defined

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community, the talent of its developers and the appeal of its uniqueness. Namecoin has a use most other coins don’t. It was an early altcoin, so it has a large number of knowledgeable investors with backgrounds as developers who have an interest in seeing the technology survive. Former Namecoin developer

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. Blackcoin has made headway in China as well, with a significant number of the coin’s nodes residing in that country. The price of an altcoin matters only because if it gets too low, people will lose interest. Otherwise, there isn’t much use in tracking the price outside of day

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survive until the market settles itself. Currently it is oversaturated with legitimate and scam coins. Eventually this oversaturation will result in a crash of the altcoin ecosystem. The coins that survive will be in an advantageous position. Blackcoin has a chance of doing this because its development team is talented enough

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still light-years ahead in support from both inside and outside the community. Ethereum has proven itself head and shoulders above the rest of the altcoin world. Its product took far longer than expected to be released, and that caused many to write it off. But when it was, the mainstream

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likely be wrong at least as often as I am right, what kind of services do I see evolving in a cryptocurrency wonderland? Amazing ones. Altcoins are currently plagued by speculative investing. This drives everything in the space. If the price goes down, the community demands that the developers announce something

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drive up the price—and then communities and developers alike can become discouraged. I think the most important and interesting innovations to come from the altcoin space—both actual alternative cryptocurrencies and “coins” built on top of Bitcoin—will come from communities that realize chasing the price is a fruitless endeavor

Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition

by Imran Bashir · 28 Mar 2018

MIDAS Bitcoin limitations Privacy and anonymity Mixing protocols Third-party mixing protocols Inherent anonymity Extended protocols on top of Bitcoin Colored coins Counterparty Development of altcoins Consensus algorithms Hashing algorithms Difficulty adjustment algorithms Inter-block time Block rewards Reward halving rate Block size and transaction size Interest rate Coinage Total supply

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to build Bitcoin applications. Chapter 8, Alternative Coins, introduces alternative cryptocurrencies that were introduced after the invention of Bitcoin. It also presents examples of different altcoins, their properties, and how they have been developed and implemented. Chapter 9, Smart Contracts, provides an in-depth discussion on smart contracts. Topics such as

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, this is a concept whereby coins can be moved from one blockchain to another and moved back again. Typical uses include the creation of new altcoins (alternative cryptocurrencies) whereby coins are burnt as a proof of an adequate stake. Burnt or burning the coins in this context means that the coins

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launched. Bitcoin was released in 2009, and the first alternative coin project (named Namecoin) was introduced in 2011. In 2013 and 2014, the alternative coins (altcoin) market grew exponentially, and many different types of alternative coin project were started. A few of those became a success, whereas many were unpopular due

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purpose of the alternative project is to introduce a new virtual currency, it is called an altcoin. Alternative blockchains will be discussed in detail in Chapter 16, Alternative Blockchains. This chapter is mainly dedicated to altcoins whose primary purpose is to introduce a new virtual currency (coin) although some material will also

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Namecoin, where the primary purpose is to provide decentralized naming and identity services instead of currency. Currently, as of late 2018, there are hundreds of altcoins on the market, and they hold some monetary value such as Namecoin, Zcash, Primecoin, and many others. We will examine some of these later in

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this chapter. Zcash is a more successful altcoin introduced in 2016. On the other hand, Primecoin did not gain much popularity however it is still used. Many of these alternative projects are direct

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forks of Bitcoin source code although some of those have been written from scratch. Some altcoins set out to address Bitcoin limitations such as privacy. Some others offer different types of mining, changes in block times, and distribution schemes. By definition

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, an altcoin is generated in the case of a hard fork. If bitcoin has a hard fork then the other, older chain is effectively considered another coin

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. However, there is no established rule as to which chain becomes the altcoin. This has happened with Ethereum, where a hard fork caused a new currency Ethereum Classic (ETC) to come into existence in addition to the Ethereum

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to the proposition; second, it also splits the user community due to disagreement over the hard fork. Although a hard fork, in theory, generates an altcoin, it is limited in what it can offer because, even if the change results in a hard fork, usually there are no drastic changes around

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new coin from scratch or fork the bitcoin (or another coin's source code) to create a new currency with the desired parameters and features. Altcoins must be able to attract new users, trades, and miners otherwise the currency will have no value. Currency gains its value, especially in the virtual

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the new coin does not perform well than their initial investment may be lost. Methods of providing an initial number of altcoins are discussed as follows: Create a new blockchain: Altcoins can create a new blockchain and allocate coins to initial miners, but this approach is now unpopular due to many scam

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a profit with the launch of a new currency and then disappeared. Proof of Burn (PoB): Another approach to allocating initial funds to a new altcoin is PoB, also called a one-way peg or price ceiling. In this method users permanently destroy a certain quantity of bitcoins in proportion to

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the quantity of altcoins to be claimed. For example, if ten bitcoins were destroyed then altcoins can have a value no greater than some bitcoins destroyed. This means that bitcoins are being converted into

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altcoins by burning them. Proof of ownership: Instead of permanently destroying bitcoins, an alternative method is to prove that users own a certain number of bitcoins.

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This proof of ownership can be used to claim altcoins by tethering altcoin blocks to Bitcoin blocks. For example, this can be achieved by merged mining in which effectively bitcoin miners can mine

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altcoin blocks while mining for bitcoin without any extra work. Merged mining is explained later in the chapter. Pegged sidechains: Sidechains, as the name suggests, are

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blockchains separate from the bitcoin network but bitcoins can be transferred to them. Altcoins can also be transferred back to the bitcoin network. This concept is called a two-way peg. Investing and trading these alternative coins is also

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a big business, albeit not as big as bitcoin but enough to attract new investors and traders and provide liquidity to the market. Combined altcoin market capitalization is shown as follows: The graph is generated from https://coinmarketcap.com/. This graph shows that at the time of writing the Combined

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Altcoin Market Capitalization is more than 200 billion US Dollars Current market cap (as of March, 2018) of the top 10 coins is shown as follows:

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theoretical concepts first. Theoretical foundations In this section, various theoretical concepts are introduced to the reader that has been developed with the introduction of different altcoins in the past few years. Alternatives to Proof of Work The PoW scheme in the context of cryptocurrency was first used in Bitcoin and served

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. This is a different approach from the usual form of PoS where mining is made easier for users who have the highest stake in the altcoin. In the coin-age-based approach, the age of the coin (coinage) is reset every time a block is mined. The miner is rewarded for

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type of PoS. Proof of Burn As an alternate expenditure to computing power, PoB, in fact, destroys a certain number of bitcoins to get equivalent altcoins. This is commonly used when starting up a new coin projects as a means to provide a fair initial distribution. This can be considered an

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alternatives will keep emerging as blockchain technology grows. Difficulty adjustment and retargeting algorithms Another concept that has been introduced with the advent of bitcoin and altcoins is difficulty in retargeting algorithms. In bitcoin, a difficulty target is calculated simply by the following equation; however other coins have either developed their algorithms

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just simply use an ASIC miner and control the entire network. This attack would be more practical if there is less interest in the new altcoin and someone decides to take over the network by consuming adequately high computing resources. This may not be a possible attack if other miners with

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similar computing power also join the altcoin network because then miners will be competing with each other. Also, multipools pose a more significant threat where a group of miners can automatically switch

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the currency that is becoming profitable. This phenomenon is known as pool hopping and can adversely affect a blockchain, and consequently the growth of the altcoin. Pool hopping impacts the network adversely because pool hoppers join the network only when the difficulty is low and they can gain quick rewards; the

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. In the following section, readers will be introduced to the few difficulty algorithms being used in and proposed for various altcoins. Kimoto Gravity Well This algorithm is used in various altcoins to regulate difficulty. This method was first introduced in Megacoin and used to adjust the difficulty of the network every block

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readjustment mechanism. The formula is shown as follows: 2222222/ (((Difficulty+2600)/9)^2) This formula is implemented in Dash coin, Bitcoin SegWit2X and various other altcoins as a mechanism to readjust difficulty. DGW version 3.0 is the latest implementation of DGW algorithm and allows improved difficulty retargeting as compared to

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. The original post about this is now available via web archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20161005171345/http://dillingers.com/blog/2015/04/21/altcoin-difficulty-adjustment-with-midas/. The interested readers can read more about this at the preceding location. This concludes our introduction to various difficulty adjustment algorithms

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and protocols have emerged as an attempt to address various limitations in Bitcoin. Bitcoin limitations Various limitations in Bitcoin have also sparked some interest in altcoins, which were developed specifically to address limitations in Bitcoin. The most prominent and widely discussed limitation is the lack of anonymity in Bitcoin. We will

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in the previous chapter. The idea can be visualized with the following diagram: BTC relay concept Counterparty is available at http://counterparty.io/. Development of altcoins Altcoin projects can be started very quickly from a coding point of view by simply forking the bitcoin or another coin's source code, but this

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puzzle and is allowed to have a coinbase transaction that contains the reward. This used to be 50 coins in bitcoin initially and now many altcoins set this parameter to a very high number; for example, in Dogecoin it is 10,000, currently. Reward halving rate This is another important factor

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that determines how high or low the transaction rate can be on the network. Block sizes in bitcoin are limited to 1 MB but in altcoins, it can vary depending on the requirements. Interest rate This property applies only to PoS systems where the owner of the coins can earn interest

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coin is one of the newly created coins that have their code written entirely from scratch. In the next section, readers are introduced to some altcoin projects. It is not possible to cover all alternative currencies in this chapter, but a few selected coins are discussed in the following section. Selection

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foundations, trading, and mining. Namecoin Namecoin is the first fork of the Bitcoin source code. The key idea behind Namecoin is not to produce an altcoin but instead to provide improved decentralization, censorship resistance, privacy, security, and faster-decentralized naming. Decentralized naming services are intended to respond to inherent limitations such

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has been contributed towards solving the Namecoin block. The coinbase transaction is used to include the hash of the transactions from Namecoin (or any other altcoin if merged mining with that coin). The mining task is to solve Bitcoin blocks whose coinbase scriptSig contains a hash pointer to Namecoin (or any

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other altcoin) block. This is shown in the following diagram: Merged mining visualization If a miner manages to solve a hash at the bitcoin blockchain difficulty level

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/223 https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/777 Summary In this chapter, we introduced you to the overall cryptocurrency landscape. We discussed a number of altcoins in detail, especially Zcash and Namecoin. Cryptocurrencies are a very active area for research, especially around scalability, privacy, and security aspects. Some research has also

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needs to be carried out in the areas of privacy and especially scalability of blockchain. Now you should be able to appreciate the concept of altcoins and various motivations behind them. We also discussed few practical aspects, such as mining and starting a new currency project, which hopefully will give you

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a strong foundation, enabling you to explore these areas further. Altcoins are a fascinating field of research and they open many possibilities for a decentralized future. In the next chapter, we will see what smart contracts

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts

by Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey · 8 Dec 2020 · 434pp · 77,974 words

Consensus Stakeholders Brokerages Exchanges Custody Analytics Information Summary 3. Forks and Altchains Bitcoin Improvement Proposals Understanding Forks Contentious Hard Forks The Bitcoin Cash Fork Altcoins Litecoin More Altcoin Experiments “2.0” Chains NXT Counterparty Privacy-Focused Cryptocurrencies Dash Monero Zcash Ripple and Stellar Ripple Stellar Scaling Blockchains SegWit Lightning Other Altchain Solutions

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-moving space. Aaron Caswell, Expert Blockchain Engineer Get down in the trenches with Lorne and Daniel and find out what’s really inside Bitcoin, Ethereum, altcoin, and other blockchains and forks. Karen Kilroy, CEO, Kilroy Blockchain Corporation Mastering Blockchain goes from the basics to using blockchain in real-life implementations in

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started to come together for the common good of the network, many programmers decided to software fork the technology, allowing them to create their own altcoins. Forking involves taking the Bitcoin Core software, changing some parameters, and launching it on mailing lists and message boards. The result is alternative coins, also

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known as altcoins. Some of these altcoins are so different from Bitcoin that it is better to refer to them as altchains. Forking can actually mean a few different things in

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at 128 MB and stay at that number. The differences proved irreconcilable, leading to another hard fork. Altcoins The term altcoin is usually used to refer to forks of the Bitcoin Core software. The early altcoin frenzy began in 2011, after Bitcoin had gained some degree of traction, had gone through its vulnerability

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attack, and developers had begun to trust the technology. Here are some of the earlier altcoins: Ixcoin This fork was an early premined altcoin (see the next section for more on premining). After generating 580,000 coins ahead of time, the founder(s) launched Ixcoin

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proof-of-work with a use beyond just confirming transactions, with the work focusing on searching for chains of prime numbers. Litecoin The best-known altcoin from the early era is Litecoin. In 2011, Charlie Lee, a developer at Google, began spending time playing around with the Bitcoin code. He had

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-term because an anonymous founder who had premined could simply walk away at any time, taking their funds with them. Also, many of the early altcoins did not brand themselves well. Lee thought deeply about creating something better. He thought of Bitcoin as a store of value similar to gold, and

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took Lee one week of planning and four hours of coding. It is still one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. More Altcoin Experiments Lots more altcoins have been launched since the early era. A few interesting examples include: Dogecoin Invented by programmer Billy Markus and marketer Jackson Palmer in

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blockchain implemented replay protection in November 2016 through Ethereum Improvement Proposal 155 (EIP155), which was included in something called the Spurious Dragon hard fork. Summary Altcoins and altchains are fascinating explorations of what can be done with blockchains and cryptocurrencies. While numerous variations have been proposed, the majority of the projects

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describe a record-keeping system. The term permissionless ledger is sometimes used to describe cryptocurrency-based blockchains. This includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, various forks, and most altcoins. These networks are called permissionless because anyone can join in and participate; there is no central authority that grants or denies permission. Blockchain in the

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adoption of blockchain, The Future of Blockchain airdrops, disbursement of cryptocurrencies via, Airdrops airgapped computers, Counterparty Risk altchains, Understanding Forks altcoins, Understanding Forks, Altcoins-Counterpartyearlier, sample of, Altcoins Litecoin, Litecoin other, More Altcoin Experiments Amazon Quantum Ledger, Blockchain as a Service analysis, Analysis-Hunting for Bartanalytics services for cryptocurrency blockchains, Analytics fundamental cryptocurrency analysis

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contract application-based blockchain transactions, Ether and Gas application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), Mining Is About IncentivesASIC-resistant Scrypt algorithm, Litecoin deterring use for mining, Altcoins X11 ASIC-resistant proof-of-work, Dash arbitrage, Jurisdiction, Arbitrage, Arbitrage Trading-Float Configuration 3basic, Arbitrage Trading basic mistakes in, Basic Mistakes exchange risk, Exchange

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, Slippage coinbase transaction, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, The Coinbase TransactionBitcoin Genesis block, Achieving Consensus Coincheck, Coincheck CoinDesk, Information coins, DigiCash Coinye, More Altcoin Experiments cold storage wallets, Counterparty Risk cold wallets, Wallet Type Variations collisions, cryptographic hashes and, Hashes colored coins, NXT, Colored Coins and Tokens Commodity Exchange

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, Decentralized Applications (Dapps)Bitcoin, Compelling Components distributed versus centralized versus decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized-Bitcoin Predecessors Dogecoin, More Altcoin Experiments Domain Name System (DNS), decentralized version of, Altcoins dot-com crash, Tulip Mania or the internet? double spend problem, Hashcashin Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper dumping of a

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Configuration 2 configuration 3, Float Configuration 3 timing and managing, Timing and Managing Float Force, Carl, Skirting the Laws forks, Understanding Forks-Replay attacks, Altcoins(see also altcoins) contentious hard forks, Contentious Hard Forks-Replay attacksfork of Bitcoin Cash into Bitcoin SV, The Bitcoin Cash Fork replay attacks vulnerability, Replay attacks different

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Laws gas, Ether and GasETH Gas Station, Gas and Pricing list of gas prices by opcode, Gas and Pricing GAW Miners, Skirting the Laws GeistGeld, Altcoins Gemini, arbitrage trading on, Arbitrage Trading-Exchange APIs and Trading BotsAPI example, BTC/USD ticker call, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots Genesis block (Bitcoin), Achieving

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interoperability between different blockchains, Interoperability Interplanetary File System (IPFS), Web 3.0 issuance trust, Electronic Systems and Trust IT systems, permissioned ledger uses, IT Ixcoin, Altcoins J Java, Corda language JPMorgan, JPMorganinterbank payments using permissioned ledger, Payments jurisdiction over cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction K Keccak-256 hash algorithm, Hashes Know Your Customer

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for, Mining Is About Incentives miners discovering new block at same time, The mining process process on Bitcoin for block discovery, The mining process Scrypt, Altcoins transactions confirmed by miner on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle mint-based currency model, The Whitepaper minting, Important Definitions MKR token, DAI mobile wallets, Wallet Type

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and the Travel Rule MoneyGram, Ripple Mt. Gox exchange, Counterparty Riskhacking attacks on, Mt. Gox-Bitfinex multisignature wallet contracts, Multisignature Contracts-Multisignature Contracts N Namecoin, Altcoins naming services, Naming Services network hash rate, Block discovery networkscentralized versus decentralized versus distributed design, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized Corda, The Corda networknodes having

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Plasma implementation of sidechains, Other Altchain Solutions Ponzi schemes in cryptocurrency, Skirting the Laws PotCoin, More Altcoin Experiments precompilation of zk-SNARKs, zk-SNARKs preminingissues with, Litecoin premined altcoin, Ixcoin, Altcoins prices (gas), Gas and Pricing Primecoin, Altcoins privacyand censorship resistance with dapps, Use Cases Ethereum-based privacy implementations, Ethereum-Based Privacy Implementations future

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-Stake-Proof-of-StakeByzantine fault-tolerant algorithm, HotStuff, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains Casper algorithm in Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Scaling proof-of-stake velocity, More Altcoin Experiments proof-of-storage, Alternative methods proof-of-work, Block Generation, Proof-of-Work-Confirmationsbit gold's client puzzle function type, Bit Gold block discovery

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sidechains, Sidechains STARKs, STARKs Schnorr algorithm, Privacy Scott, Mark, Skirting the Laws SCP consensus protocol, Stellar scripted money, Improving Bitcoin’s Limited Functionality Scrypt mining, Altcoins, Litecoin Secret Network, Privacy securitiestokens proposed in ICOs, Different Token Types unregistered securities offerings, Skirting the Laws Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FinCEN Guidance and

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analysis soft forks, Understanding Forks software development, changes from use of cryptcurrency and blockchain, Web 3.0 software forks, Understanding Forks software wallets, Wallets Solidcoin, Altcoins Solidity language, Authoring a smart contract South Korean exchanges, Regulatory Challenges speculation in cryptocurrency, Market Infrastructure, Tulip Mania or the internet? spoofing, Wash Trading spot

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for derivative assets, Derivatives Szabo, Nick, Bit Gold T Taproot, Privacy target value in block discovery, Block discovery TCP/IP, The More Things Change Tenebrix, Altcoins testingEthereum testnets, Challenges in Developing Dapps, Authoring a smart contract sandbox environment for exchange APIs, Testing in a Sandbox Tether, Tether, Tethertransaction in Omniexplorer, Adding

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method call to Uniswap smart contract, Custody and counterparty risk-Exchange rate smart contract viewable on Ethereum, Infrastructure token listing on, Token listing Unobtainium, More Altcoin Experiments unspent transaction output (see UTXO model) US agencies and regulatory bodies regulating cryptocurrencies, FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation US Dollar Coin (USDC

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order

by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey · 27 Jan 2015 · 457pp · 128,838 words

head around, but big ideas never are. The bottom line is that even if bitcoin doesn’t keep growing, even if none of the other “altcoin” cryptocurrencies catch on—and several hundred of these bitcoinlike cryptocurrencies with their own features and quirks exist—we’ve seen a way of doing business

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was that by 2011, bitcoin was inspiring imitators—some outright copies, others clear attempts to remove what were seen as some of bitcoin’s flaws. Altcoins, as they came to be known, would use the same or similar aspects of bitcoin’s system, all made possible because of bitcoin’s open

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be worth mentioning, but a few with sizable followings. They all fall well short of bitcoin in ranks. Litecoin, the oldest and largest of the altcoins, had a market cap of about $150 million at the time of writing. Bitcoin’s was around $6.5 billion. Some are dubious-looking projects

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the nascent movements gathering around them could detract from the broader mission of change. At the same time, the community development around some of these altcoins is instructive to the broader question of how communities develop around cryptocurrencies. Bitcoiners can learn from how passions have been stirred by some of them

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. Case in point: dogecoin, an altcoin that started out as a joke by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in December 2013 that quickly took on a life of its own. The

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that it was driven by the power of its community. “Community is everything for a currency,” he said. The question is whether the emergence of altcoin communities such as this one undercuts the wider bitcoin community or benefits it. Some wonder whether these imitators will simply take market share away from

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bitcoin—though with bitcoin’s market capitalization more than ten times that of the combined ninety-nine next biggest altcoins, no such threat had arisen as of September 2014. Others think that by expanding both the range of technological innovation and the branding and cultural

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give bitcoin a run for its money in being the main driver of that future. Much of this rethinking is happening via the development of altcoins. As we mentioned in chapter 3, hundreds of these bitcoin imitators now exist. Many are going nowhere, dismissed as get-rich-quick schemes or jokes

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, which is why many developers think the best solution is to fix its flaws rather than come up with entirely new systems. Nevertheless, the best altcoins are bringing an edgy and potentially constructive force of competition to bear in the whole cryptocurrency arena. Of these

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altcoins, litecoin, invented by Charlie Lee, is to date the most successful. Litecoin’s secret sauce is its use of a different algorithm in the hashing

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the corollary of its strength: because it’s cheaper to mine litecoins and because scrypt-based rigs can be used to mine other scrypt-based altcoins such as dogecoin, miners are less heavily invested in permanently working its blockchain. In theory, that could raise the risk of a 51 percent attack

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more environmentally friendly, democratic contender to bitcoin. Scrypt mining is not the only solution to bitcoin’s concentrated mining and 51 percent attack threat. Some altcoins, including nextcoin and peercoin, use “proof of stake” as an alternative to the “proof of work” paradigm’s wasteful and costly computing. This way, your

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that use these protocols to implement the back-and-forth functions of their decentralized applications. These are tradable for bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies on special altcoin exchanges such as Cryptsy, where their value is expected to rise and fall according to the success or failure of the protocol to which they

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, remittance services, money transmitters, and exchange houses and are expected to freely contribute computing resources to the network. The digital asset traders are designers of altcoin backed by gold or of contracts denominated in fiat currencies. They confirm transactions by a system of consensus that, unlike bitcoin’s ten-minute blocks

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expected to come to market, the price of XRP tanked, losing 45 percent of its value in bitcoins, the currency against which it trades on altcoin markets, in two days. The Reddit thread that McCaleb had initiated lit up. Some commentators applauded McCaleb for being so open about his sales; others

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don’t care,” he says. “They want to hear about what it can do, and they see the benefits.” Still, as with a number of altcoin launches that soared in price at their outset only to subsequently plunge when investors began suspecting the founders of running a “pump and dump” scam

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. Inevitably, once the offering was over, the artificially supported price of mastercoins plunged, leaving a horde of angry investors holding stakes in a highly illiquid altcoin and no safecoins. MaidSafe and Mastercoin tried to make amends by buying back some of the new safecoins and reselling them at a discount for

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, which have no issuance limits and would offer an escape valve for economies that find themselves short of money. What’s more, a number of altcoins coming to market are more open-ended, with flexible issuance schemes. These could one day pose an alternative to a deflationary bitcoin monetary system. (That

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and invest in it. You don’t need buy-in from Mom and Pop to realize some impressive gains. But we can equally imagine various altcoin alternatives becoming the preferred payment infrastructure. Ripple Labs’ system, for example, is deliberately designed to facilitate international transfers in fiat currencies and other units of

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cofounder Jed McCaleb set up with a deliberately charitable agenda. Alternatively, projects such as Realcoin, an altcoin built upon the bitcoin blockchain that’s transparently backed by an auditable reserve of dollar-based assets, turn altcoins into a proxy for the dollar and an instrument with which people can cheaply send money

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financial system. Still, bitcoin is the clear frontrunner to become the cryptocurrency platform of the world’s transactional system. Its market capitalization dwarfs all other altcoins combined. Wences Casares, the CEO of bitcoin wallet and custodial firm Xapo, sees bitcoin’s future as the “native currency of the Internet,” where it

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taken from CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index chart, http://www.coindesk.com/price/. Litecoin, the oldest and largest of the altcoins: Market-capitalization data taken from CoinMarketCap Web site, http://coinmarketcap.com/. altcoin that started out as a joke by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer: Patrick McGuire, “Such Weird: The Founders of

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Bleish, “An Interview with Jeff Garzik, Bitcoin in Space,” Bitcoin Magazine, June 17, 2014, http://bitcoinmagazine.com/14069/interview-jeff-garzik-bitcoin-space/. Of these altcoins, litecoin: Litecoin explanations taken from various sources, including https://litecoin.org/. In the case of nextcoin: Nextcoin explanations taken from various sources, including http://nxt

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Afghan Citadel Afghanistan Africa A-Grade Investments Ahmadi, Parisa AIG Airbnb Akimbo Alamgir, Nadia Alcoholics Anonymous Aleph Alibaba Alipay Alisie, Mihai Allaire, Jeremy al-Qaeda altcoins dogecoin litecoin Realcoin Alyattes, King Alydian Amazon Amazon Cloud American Express AME Ventures Amidi, Saeed Andolfatto, David Andreessen, Marc Andreessen Horowitz Andresen, Gavin Android angel

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dollar and double-spending of early adopters of encryption in evangelists of exchange rate of fraud and future of Genesis Block in imitators of, see altcoins issuance of meetups for mining, see bitcoin mining and miners merchants accepting as movement as payments protocol as property regulation of, see regulation release of

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?

by Dominic Frisby · 1 Nov 2014 · 233pp · 66,446 words

can bet there are many stories that are as disheartening as the above are amusing. The world of crypto-currencies (there are now over 300 altcoins) has attracted all sorts of crooks and fraudsters, as well as those who religiously think they are changing the world. There are scams and get

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the Wild West. Over time, things should settle. But one of the things you quickly notice is the sense of humour to it all. Many altcoins are based around a joke – ‘Coinye West’, for example. (When my father read this he asked, ‘What’s the joke?’) Many are simply in it

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National Geographic in the US, it might be a video game made somewhere in Asia, a video for a Canadian mining company or some new altcoin based in the ether. I am often asked to speak or do gigs overseas. In the last year or two I’ve done gigs or

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were made. Instead, coders began to develop alternative cryptocurrencies, aping some aspects of Bitcoin but changing others. These were known as altcoins. There are now 300 or more kinds of altcoin. Many of them are scams and get-rich-quick schemes. Many of them are simply experiments. Most of them will amount

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cent of the entire cryptocurrency market cap. At $500 a coin, the market cap of Bitcoin stands at around $6.5 billion. All the other altcoins combined amount to about $350,000. Bitcoin has attracted all the publicity. Bitcoin has all the infrastructure and investment. For now Bitcoin dominates the space

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. But the altcoins may one day come to rival Bitcoin. Litecoin is said to be silver to Bitcoin’s gold. It has faster transaction time confirmation than Bitcoin

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mining system with a software development platform – more on this in a moment. It’s not hard to envisage a future with hundreds of different altcoins – all with their own quirks and uses. Perhaps you will have many different wallets with many different coins – just as now, you have different currencies

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that explosive Bitcoin price move in late 2013 and it was mesmerising. You could see the excitement in all the people who owned all these altcoins. Significant wealth was created out of thin air in moments and, of course, it’s all evaporated since in most cases. There are only two

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really wouldn’t want the volatility that it has. The average volatility over the last five years for Bitcoin has been 110% and higher for altcoins. For gold it’s 18%, for silver it’s 28% and for the stock market it’s about 15%. For the dollar it’s about

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day and age.’ ‘How would you invest in Bitcoin?’ I ask him. ‘Well, I think that what is more interesting is to find a good altcoin – to find a real network that’s growing that’s not Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin itself is a very interesting investment. You should probably have

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some money there. But on the side if you want to make the real money, the catch-up trade – some altcoins. I think your first trade should just be $50 to try and learn how the system works. Don’t do anything until you’re absolutely

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comfortable with how the system works. Then I suggest you go and put 90% of your crypto book into bitcoins and 10% into altcoins. To find the good ones, don’t believe the stories and avoid hype. Avoid new coins, they are actually worthless most of the time, and

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ever going to be price stability with Bitcoin. ‘First, there are a lot of innovative pressures. There’s tons of competition, there’s over 300 altcoins and there’s always new technology being invented. So that does have a very significant effect on the price of Bitcoin. ‘Second, we have rapid

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with the dotcom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of the companies now operating in the Bitcoin space, including most of the altcoins that have sprung up, will amount to nothing. There might be computer geniuses at the helm, but conceiving and implementing a good idea and running

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is clear: even with technology that changes the way we do things, you will still probably lose money. Only a handful of the companies and altcoins that have sprung up will make it, but those that do could dominate the space for many years to come, just as those few rail

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with an interest in IT was involved in some Bitcoin start-up or other. Either that or he was designing some new alt currency – some altcoins were rising at over a thousand per cent per day. ‘Banks, governments, they’re irrelevant now,’ these upstarts declared. I suggest that in late 2013

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. If they really do take off, despite everything I’ve just said, you could still make a great deal of money speculating in Bitcoin and altcoins. Let’s imagine Bitcoin becomes an established asset class in itself – along with the likes of gold, commodities, bonds and stocks. I’ll give you

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price would be $119,000 per coin – a 24,000% gain from the current price of $500. Assuming widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies, the lesser-known altcoins, if they take off, will rise by a greater magnitude. When a bubble gets really big, it grows to the size of the US stock

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did the same. At present the total market cap of US stocks stands at around $22 trillion. The combined market value of Bitcoin and the altcoins stands at $7.5 billion. If Bitcoin becomes a bubble on the scale of gold in the 1970s, Japan in the 1980s or tech stocks

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be televised. It will be time-stamped on the block chain. It is all very exciting. For any conventional or mainstream investor, aside from buying altcoins, it is almost too early to buy in. There are no listed companies. There is no block chain tech ETF you can buy. There is

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and stories (as well as all the usual misinformation you find on chat boards). Coinmarketcap.com is a useful site to introduce yourself to the altcoins. It gives you price information about the hundred biggest cryptocurrencies, as well links to their sites. For those with an interest in finance, I would

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

by Melanie Swan · 22 Jan 2014 · 271pp · 52,814 words

many—potentially all—Bitcoin users’ computers, and continuously viewable on the Internet. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized cryptocurrency. There are hundreds of other “altcoin” (alternative coin) cryptocurrencies, like Litecoin and Dogecoin, but Bitcoin comprises 90 percent of the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies and is the de facto standard

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have occurred in that currency—as part of the decentralized scheme by which coin transactions are verified. Appendix A covers the practicalities of maintaining an altcoin wallet in more detail. Figure 1-1. Bitcoin ewallet app and transferring Bitcoin (image credits: Bitcoin ewallet developers and InterAksyon) eWallet Services and Personal Cryptosecurity

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application.19 The core functionality of blockchain currencies is that any transaction can be sourced and completed directly between two individuals over the Internet. With altcoins, you can allocate and trade resources between individuals in a completely decentralized, distributed, and global way. With that ability, a cryptocurrency can be a programmable

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the developing blockchain industry. Bitcoin prediction markets are one way to see what insiders think about Bitcoin’s future price directions, the success of different altcoin and protocol 2.0 projects, and industry issues more generally (e.g., technical development issues with Bitcoin, such as when there will be a hard

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-purpose Turing-complete cryptocurrency platform Own blockchain, Ethereum virtual machine Mastercoin http://www.mastercoin.org/ Financial derivatives Bitcoin blockchain overlay NXT http://www.nxtcommunity.org/ Altcoin mined with proof-of-stake consensus model Bitcoin blockchain overlay Open Transactions http://opentransactions.org/ Untraceable anonymous, no latency transactions No blockchain; transactions library BitShares

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computer to others’ use, caveat emptor applies, and participants in Storj or any similar project should satisfactorily inform themselves of the security details. Storj’s altcoin token, Storjcoin X (SJCX), is a cryptocurrency that runs on the Counterparty protocol. The currency is used to purchase space on the Storj network via

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and individuals involved. Namecoin: Decentralized Domain Name System One of the first noncurrency uses of blockchain technology was to prevent Internet censorship with Namecoin, an altcoin that can be used to verify Domain Name System (DNS) registrations. Namecoin is an alternative DNS that is transnational and cannot be controlled by any

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to image use enforcement and tracking. Monegraph works in a two-step process using Twitter, Namecoin, and Monegraph. Namecoin is used because it is an altcoin that can be used to verify DNS registrations in an automated, decentralized way; any similar DNS confirmation service could be used.104 First, to stake

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there has been no way to take advantage of a centralized repository of precedents used to resolve disputes, so Precedent is developing a concept, framework, altcoin, and community to implement a decentralized autonomous legal procedure organization (as described in further detail in “The Precedent Protocol Whitepaper.” Precedent’s “polycentric decentralized legal

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for a dispute to be justiciable (appropriate or suitable for adjudication), and they can fork the protocol if new standards are deemed preferable. The tokenized altcoin, Precedentcoin or nomos, is used for community economic functions like paying to submit a dispute to the network and remunerating “miners” for community dispute resolution

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consider it safest and easiest to build protocol 3.0 ideas on this installed base without having to mount a mining operation on a new altcoin blockchain. Mining is another area upon which there are many centralization pressures. The fierce competition has driven mining from individuals with mining rigs to mining

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being a more specific means of organizing and coordinating group behavior toward some goal. Communitycoin: Hayek’s Private Currencies Vie for Attention The explosion of altcoin and Communitycoin, tokens or coins enabling economic function in a specific community context like the LTBcoin just described, suggests that some of the aspects of

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should be an open source, templated solution for any university (administrators and student groups alike) to easily issue Campuscoin (e.g., ASUcoin). The same templated altcoin issuance could extend to groups within these communities, like DeltaChiCoin or NeuroscienceConferenceCoin, to support any specific group’s activities. The Campuscoin issuance template could have

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commodity extends to many other nonmonetary currencies beyond reputation and health, such as intention, attention, time, ideas, and creativity. Currency Multiplicity: Monetary and Nonmonetary Currencies Altcoin multiplicity is just one venue of currency multiplicity in the modern world. More broadly, we are living in an increasingly multicurrency society with all kinds

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detecting malicious players. Another significant barrier to Bitcoin adoption is the ongoing theft, scandals, and scams (like so-called new altcoin “pump and dump” scams that try to bid up new altcoins to quickly profit) in the industry. The collapse of the largest Bitcoin exchange at the time, Tokyo-based MtGox, in

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future of human progress, ultimately it might be a tool for increasing the information resolution of the universe. Appendix A. Cryptocurrency Basics Bitcoin and other altcoins are digital cash, a way of buying and selling things over the Internet. The first step is establishing a digital wallet, either via a browser

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/qdGoRep5iT0/. Index A address, How a Cryptocurrency Works Airbnb, Government Regulation Alexandria, Freedom of Speech/Anti-Censorship Applications: Alexandria and Ostel altcoin, Summary: Blockchain 1.0 in Practical Use altcoin wallet, How a Cryptocurrency Works alternative currencies, Summary: Blockchain 1.0 in Practical Use-Relation to Fiat Currency, Cryptocurrency Basics-Ledra Capital

The Internet of Money

by Andreas M. Antonopoulos · 28 Aug 2016 · 200pp · 47,378 words

.5 billion from Chinese investors who discovered a counterbalance to the world domination of the global reserve currency of the US dollar. 1.5.1. Altcoins: Currencies for Everyone There are almost 200 currencies of the world, but there’s only one international currency. There are almost 200 currencies controlled by

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over 100 competing currencies in the space, which shows how quickly innovation has exploded, even beyond bitcoin the currency. There are many other alternative currencies — altcoins, as they’re known—that use the same basic technology of a decentralized asset ledger using consensus in the network with Satoshi’s algorithm. Some

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of its thunder?" Those are questions I’ve heard several times, and I’ve heard people refer to that issue in trying to understand altcoins - wondering whether altcoins essentially threaten the dominance of bitcoin, if they make bitcoin weaker, if they distribute the value of the network too broadly. 7.1. Born

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the evolution of alt-currencies, as they’re called, I realized I was asking the wrong questions. How many currencies will there be? How many altcoins will there be? How will altcoins compete in a world of cryptocurrencies as we move into the future? Will there be hundreds of

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altcoins? If there are hundreds of altcoins, what does that mean for the value of each of the altcoins? How do they compete? That was the wrong way of thinking about it. I saw currency as a

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things like that happen. We’re not going to have hundreds of altcoins. We’re not going to have thousands of altcoins. We’re going to have hundreds of thousands, and then millions of altcoins. Then, there will be thousands of altcoins being created every day to organize local communities to express fads, to

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create popularity contests, to codify the latest internet meme. "We’re not going to have hundreds of altcoins. We’re not going to have thousands

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of altcoins. We’re going to have hundreds of thousands, and then millions of alt-coins." 7.3. Authority by Production With so

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many altcoins, how do you tell which ones have value and which ones don’t? In order to try to answer these types of questions, I often

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room, ask them to teach you bitcoin.” Their 10-year-old will understand it. I’ve met kids that use web-based interfaces to create altcoins of their own. One of the interesting questions I get often is "How many coins and currencies will there be?" The answer to that is

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Zombie of Currencies, Incumbent Reactions to Innovation, Infrastructure for Natural Gas, Choosing Currencies and Communities, Innovation, Design, and Adoption age of, How Old Is Money? altcoins, Altcoins: Currencies for Everyone, Accelerating Innovation, Currency as a Language, Inventing Currency on the Playground, Currency as an App value, Authority by Production, Valuing Currencies by

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

by David Gerard · 23 Jul 2017 · 309pp · 54,839 words

crypto bubble How to get bitcoins From the first bubble to the second Bitfinex: the hack, the bank block and the second bubble Chapter 9: Altcoins Litecoin Dogecoin Ethereum Buterin’s quantum quest ICOs: magic beans and bubble machines Chapter 10: Smart contracts, stupid humans Dr. Strangelove, but on the blockchain

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day reimaging thousands of PCs afresh.212 Bitcoin seems to be the only cryptocurrency used by ransomware so far – though one WannaCry imitator mined the altcoin Monero on infected PCs.213 If you do get an apparent infection, it’s worth checking it isn’t fake ransomware, that locks your screen

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(even if unrealisable) and because they loved it as a trading platform. The trapped “USD” also gets used to buy other cryptocurrencies – the price of altcoins tends to rise and fall with the price of bitcoins – and this has fueled new ICOs (“Initial Coin Offerings,” detailed next chapter), as people desperately

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Bitcoin sceptics: “If you’re so critical of Bitcoin, why don’t you short it?” “Well …” Chapter 9: Altcoins Bitcoin was an open protocol implemented in open source code. So alternate cryptocurrencies, or altcoins, quickly sprang up – mostly slightly-tweaked versions of the Bitcoin code, many generated automatically at the now-defunct

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may be less ecologically destructive – spending $49.99 of your bank balance generates less carbon dioxide than burning $49.99 worth of coal.) A few altcoins have tried new ideas, such as Namecoin (an attempt to implement an alternate Internet DNS system on a blockchain), Freicoin (which uses demurrage – negative interest

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further: DafuqCoin compromised exchanges with a rootkit because the exchanges failed to check the code before running it.286 287 Bitcoin advocates correctly consider most altcoins a scam and can effortlessly list all the problems with them – while failing to note that most of these are also problems with the substantially

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can find good numbers for those. Litecoin Litecoin is the “me too” coin. It hasn’t many interesting stories, but it was the most prominent altcoin before the first Bitcoin bubble burst; for a few years, sites like the Pirate Bay that accepted Bitcoin donations often also accepted Litecoin donations. It

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peak of $42 (spot prices of $68 on some exchanges) to $1.50. It hovered around $4 until it hit $30 in the second bubble – altcoin prices tend to track Bitcoin’s price – and the small current volume is Chinese speculators. Dogecoin Dogecoin (pronounced “dozhe-coin” or “dogue-coin”) started in

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man in the depths of an ether binge. – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas The snappy new phrase for “buy our premined altcoin” is “ICO” (“Initial Coin Offering” or “Initial Crowdfunding Offering”). These are typically tokens running on top of the Ethereum blockchain, usually in a smart contract

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with none of the due diligence of an ordinary Initial Public Offering, the barest prospectus and no indication their plan (a “market maker” to sell altcoins that aren’t selling otherwise) would even work. This is clearly superior, for a certain type of seller, to the IPO bubble of the dot

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advantage, but nobody to know what it is 100 Accenture 122 address 12 AIDS Trojan 72 AllCrypt 43 Alloway, Tracy 111 AlphaBay 72 AlphaPoint 84 altcoins 91 Altoid 51 Amazon Web Services 43, 98 anarcho-capitalism 18, 49 Andresen, Gavin 65 anonymity 26, 52 AntMiner 57 Apple 127, 137 arbitrage 83

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rootkit is jawdroppingly blatant and worth reading. Richiela. “READ ME NOW! – dafuqcoin is a trojan – pool operators/exchanges beware”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Alternate cryptocurrencies > Altcoin Discussion, 22 April 2014. (archive) [288] Wikipedia: Doge (meme). [289] Clay Michael Gillespie. “Dogecoin Leaders Present Evidence that CEO of Troubled Bitcoin Exchange Moolah Is

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] “EOS Token Purchase Agreement”. EOS.IO. (archive) [320] CoinHoarder. “EOS – Asynchronous Smart Contract Platform - (Dan Larimer of Bitshares/Steem)”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Alternate cryptocurrencies > Altcoin Discussion, 6 May 2017. (archive) [321] “Decentralized content publishing”. press.one. [322] Red Li. “Exchanges Alerts ICO Scams and Illegal Fundraising in China Punishable by

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] “Hi! My name is Rubixi. I’m a new Ethereum Doubler. Now my new home – Rubixi.tk”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Alternate cryptocurrencies > Marketplace (Altcoins) > Service Announcements (Altcoins), 11 April 2016. (archive) [353] Vitalik Buterin. “Live example of ‘underhanded solidity’ coding on mainnet”. Reddit /r/ethereum, 10 April 2016. [354] brockchainbrockshize. Comment

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous · 23 Mar 2018 · 571pp · 106,255 words

a Waste? Out of Control: Why Nobody Can Change Bitcoin Antifragility Can Bitcoin Scale? Is Bitcoin for Criminals? How to Kill Bitcoin: A Beginners' Guide Altcoins Blockchain Technology Notes Acknowledgements Bibliography Online Resources List of Figures List of Tables Index End User License Agreement List of Tables Chapter 3 Table 1

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much hype is generated, any attempt to change the consensus rules of Bitcoin will lead to the generation of yet another Bitcoin copycat, like the altcoins which copy Bitcoin's incidental details but do not have its only important characteristic: immutability. From the discussion above it should be clear that Bitcoin

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with the problem of digital cash over the years will make it clear that this is not an invention that would be easy to devise. Altcoins While Bitcoin was the first example of a peer‐to‐peer electronic cash, it was certainly not the last. Once Nakamoto's design was out

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to the will of its user according to the protocol, with no possibility for any third party to stop these payments. After years of watching altcoins get created, it seems impossible that any coin will recreate the adversarial standoff that exists between Bitcoin stakeholders and prevents any party from controlling payments

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behind it was an anonymous programmer who practically spent no money on promoting it. Being fundamentally knock‐offs that are very easy to recreate, all altcoins do not have this luxury of real‐world demand, and must actively build and increase this demand. This is why virtually all

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altcoins have a team in charge; they began the project, marketed it, designed the marketing material, and plugged press releases into the press as if they

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altered when the transactions do not go in a way that suits the interests of the development team, then the notion that any of the altcoins is truly regulated by processing power is not tenable. The concentration of currency holding, processing power, and programming skills in the hands of one group

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the teams behind this currency to destroy it, or alter its operation in a way that prevents it from competing with national currencies. No single altcoin has demonstrated anything near Bitcoin's impressive resilience to change, which is down to its truly decentralized nature and the strong incentives for everyone to

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internet for nine years without any authority controlling it, and very ably repelling some highly coordinated and well‐funded campaigns to alter it. In comparison, altcoins have the unmistakable friendly culture of nice people working together on a team project. While this would be great for a new start‐up, it

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is anathema to a project that wants to demonstrate credible commitment to a fixed monetary policy. Should the teams behind any particular altcoin decide to change its monetary policy, it would be a relatively straightforward thing to achieve. Ethereum, for instance, does not yet have a clear vision

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do. Whether it is because they are aware of this point, or to avoid run‐ins with political authority, or as a marketing gimmick, most altcoins do not market themselves as competitors to Bitcoin, but as performing tasks different to Bitcoin. There is nothing about Bitcoin's design that suggests it

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can expect more and more of these coins to enter the market, diluting the brand of all the other altcoins. Non‐Bitcoin digital currencies are, in the aggregate, easy money. No single altcoin can be considered on its own merits, because they are all indistinguishable in what they perform, which is also

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marketing and pointless buzzwords, but have all failed in adding any functional capabilities to it that have any real‐world demand. The growth of these altcoins cannot be understood outside the context of easy government money looking for easy investment, forming large bubbles in massive malinvestments. Blockchain Technology11 As a result

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node operators will continue to run the current software, holding their current bitcoins, making any attempt to upgrade the Bitcoin software effectively just another worthless altcoin like the hundreds of others that already exist. The second implication is that all the “blockchain technology” applications being touted as revolutionizing banking or database

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Market Price of Currencies per USD over the Period of September 1, 2011, to September 1, 2016 Index 51% attack, 242–245 aggry beads, 13 altcoins, 251–257 anarcho‐capitalism, 203–204 antifragility, 230–232 art, 98–104 aureus, 25 Austrian school of economics, 3, 70, 106, 142–145, 204 barter

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street

by Jeff John Roberts · 15 Dec 2020 · 226pp · 65,516 words

seemed, another obscure coin enjoyed a 100 percent pop, which in turn inspired yet another ICO. The crypto media called this flood of new currencies “altcoins”—as in, alternatives to bitcoin. Longtime bitcoin believers had their own name for the tokens: “shitcoins.” Shitcoin critics claimed the new tokens were spun up

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popular with the crypto community, crooks organized conspiracies to manipulate the market. One Telegram group known as “the Big Pump” would pick a little-known altcoin and agree to buy it en masse. The influx of buyer interest, they hoped, would cause a stir in the market and lead naive outsiders

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few months after the news came out, bitcoin hit another all-time high, near $5,000. Ethereum also soared, and so did the hundreds of altcoins riding in their wake. Brazen crypto promoters went forward with initial coin offerings all the same. The SEC is regarded as the powerful policeman of

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run on Ethereum, which brushed $1,000 by December, and XRP, which had begun the year worth half a penny and now sold for $3. Altcoins, shitcoins, anything plausibly related to blockchain soared in value. As for Litecoin, Charlie Lee’s creation had popped after it was listed on Coinbase that

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start of 2018. The market was in free fall as bitcoin lost half its value, sinking below $10,000 by February, and the state of altcoins was even worse. But for a few months, big investors could pretend the bubble had not popped—they could pray, like Wolfe’s hangover subject

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a sadder turn. The New York Times told of the hard lessons learned by an Englishman who had thrown his savings of $23,000 into altcoins and now held only $4,000. On Reddit, the stories were darker. One user told a discussion board how his wife had left him after

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he dumped all of their money into Tron, a once-hyped altcoin that hit a high of 23 cents but now trades for a penny. Other Reddit readers consoled each other with assurances that the market would

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fund money that had fled rushed back in. The buzz spread to the financial pages. Bitcoin was back. Not all crypto was back though. The altcoins, aka “shitcoins,” born in the ICO boom still stank. The prices of many remained down over 90 percent, and there was no mystery why: all

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agreeable to travel the world and speak at conferences than to labor away over blockchain code. Even bitcoin’s biggest rivals couldn’t escape the altcoin wipeout. By July, even as the price of bitcoin had increased 62 percent from a year earlier, Ethereum was down 68 percent. It turned out

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that more than two thousand shitcoins would die off like woolly mammoths. Longtime bitcoin boosters—at least those who hadn’t also invested heavily in altcoins—gloated over this turn of events. They even gave themselves a name—adding yet another term to the ever-growing body of crypto argot. They

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crypto boosters invoked the c-word—centralized—and warned people to avoid it. Suspicions of the new corporate cryptocurrency, coupled with the ongoing slump of altcoins, led bitcoin’s halo to shine brighter than ever. Satoshi’s currency was now a decade old and more secure than ever. To underscore the

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buzz around bitcoin in mid-2019 felt like a religious revival. The oldest cryptocurrency had triumphed over rival sects that had sprung up around different altcoins, and bitcoin believers felt their god was on top once and for all. That didn’t mean bitcoin didn’t have powerful enemies—including the

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Age of Cryptocurrency, The (Vigna and Casey), 23 Airbnb, 3, 5 Alford, Gary, 122 algorithms, in financial trading, 11–12 AlphaBay, 107–108 Alphabet, 64 altcoins, 138 crash in, 165, 202 value of, 146–148 Altman, Sam, 5–6, 7–8 American Kingpin (Bilton), 31 Andreessen, Marc, 11, 48 Andreessen Horowitz

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laundering, 45, 58 Mt. Gox and, 56–58 Ponzi schemes, 141–142 swindles, 141–145 threats of, 149–151 cryptocurrencies academic research on, 218–219 altcoins/shitcoins, 138 Binance and, 179–181 bubble around, 133–139 bubble in, 138–145, 149–155 bull run in, 201–203 celebrity endorsements of, 144

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(SEC), 145–146, 168–170 security threats, 78–80 Selkis, Ryan, 57, 58, 115–116 ShapeShift, 127 Shiller, Robert, 218 Shin, Laura, 76 shitcoins. See altcoins Shrem, Charlie, 58, 115–116 Silbert, Barry, 34–35, 54, 207, 213 Silicon Valley, 3–4, 10, 99–100, 212–213, 225 Silicon Valley (TV