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, they are commonly called Alternative Chains, but if the purpose of the coin is to introduce a new currency, then it can be known as an Altcoin.

Many of the Altcoins are forked directly from Bitcoin's source, and some are even written from scratch. Altcoins are looking to solve some limitation or other of Bitcoins such as the consensus method, mining limitations, block time, distribution, privacy, or sometimes even adding a feature on top of the coin.

The topics that we will be covering in this chapter are as follows:

• Introducing Altcoins
• Discussing tokens and various token platforms
• Alternative currency and a brief introduction to widely used alt currencies
• How to acquire cryptocurrency