Alt Coins
The creation of Bitcoin was followed closely by variants of bitcoin, called alt coins. There are many reasons to create an alt coin: Disagreements in the technical parameters of Bitcoin can cause developers to fork the codebase, that is, make a copy of the Open Source Bitcoin code, and from the fork on develop the code by a different set of developers. For instance, Litecoin was an experiment in faster transaction times and greater resistance to the convergence of miners into a few, controlling, mining pools.
Some alt coins added features: Zcash augmented the bitcoin protocol with a new generation of zero-knowlege proof technology to deliver a completely anonymous and blinded transaction ledger. So called stable coins experimented with pegging the price of the alt coin to another asset, for instance, Tether promised parity with the dollar: one dollar for one tether.
Other experiments tried variants of Proof of Work, such as Tendermint, which created a consensus protocol with Proof of Stake. The alt coin Namecoin was the first blockchain with an alternative application level service — that of DNS name binding. It also explored merged mining, a method by which an alt coin could gain immediate mining interest by piggy-backing off of the work done while Bitcoin mining.
The Bitcoin Cash alt coin is a hard fork of Bitcoin, the result of a controversy that raged hot and loud over increasing the block size of Bitcoin. After an agrement was not reached, those that opposed the current developers of bitcoin forked the code in an incompatible way (a hard fork, as opposed to a soft fork that can coexist with the previous code version) and went their own way.
Then there is the infamous Dogecoin. Which was not clearly serious and not clearly a joke but attained a billion dollars in market cap as part of the joke.
author: burton rosenberg
created: 18 Mar 2019
update: 18 Mar 2019