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Just as the success of Facebook helped spawn endless clones, Bitcoins arrival on the big stage comes with an assortment of digital currencies, known as altcoins, riding on Satoshis coattails. As the saying goes, a rising tide raises all ships. With Bitcoin up over 5000 percent since the beginning of the year, the altcoin market is booming. The price of Litecoin, what some consider silver to bitcoins gold (http://www.businessinsider.com/introduction-to-litecoin-201311), has traded as high as $20, up nearly 1000 percent in the last six months. Is there room for more than one sheriff in town? In the case of Facebook, competitors with similar functionality never made it, regardless of apparently advantageous tweaks to the original formula. ConnectU, a direct copy founded by the Winklevii, was short-lived. Diasporas focus on privacy failed because people simply didnt care. Google+ only survives in spite of itself because of, well, Google. Successful competitors found a way to relevantly differentiate themselves. LinkedIn was for work. Twitter focused on short status updates you could broadcast publicly. Eventually, once Facebook matured, other entrants incrementally improved the social networks fundamental features. Instagram filtered the photo while Snapchat perfected the selfie. Given bitcoins dominance, what will it take for an altcoin to succeed?
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http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-... 12/3/2013
Litecoin: the little brother Price at time of writing: $28.35 Market Cap: $503,102,328 Consistent with its name, Litecoin is essentially Bitcoin-lite and is the second most valuable altcoin. It shares nearly all the same features except it has a shorter block rate (every 2.5 minutes versus 10) and a different proof-of-work (scrypt versus SHA2). Shorter block rates mean faster transaction times, which is advantageous, but its not a huge change. The use of a separate proof-of-work is. Scrypt was chosen because it theoretically prevents the use of ASICs, those specialized chips that greatly increase mining power and efficiency (though there is debate over the validity of this claim). This is supposed to maintain a sense of egalitarian participation since the arrival of ASIC chips has significantly raised the barriers of entry for mining (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-guide-to-bitcoin-mining-why-someone-bought-a1500-bitcoin-miner-on-ebay-for-20600). If you arent already a Bitcoin miner, forget about it. That boat has sailed. Unlike social networks, Litecoin benefits from its similarities to Bitcoin because of familiarity. All digital currencies have a learning curve, which meant Litecoins creators had little explaining to do. They also lucked out with timing. Litecoin popped up right around Bitcoins bubble earlier in the year, just as the first ASIC systems started shipping. This made it especially attractive to miners suddenly squeezed out by these powerful entrants. Rather than scrap their now unprofitable mining rigs, all they had to do was download some software to start mining litecoins, which had risen in value from about 50 cents in the fall of 2012 to a few dollars by early 2013. Because why not? They had nothing to lose. Today, Litecoin maintains its status as a destination for Bitcoin castaways. For those who feel like they missed the boat, with Bitcoin hovering around $900, litecoins are a way to hedge their FOMO at a cost of only $20 each. Of course, you could always just buy a fraction of a bitcoin, but theres something psychologically satisfying about owning a couple of something rather than 0.05. All of which keeps Litecoin alive in a Google+ sort of way. Its Bitcoin, but cheaper and not as popular, with a more accessible mining system. Its there and people use it, but you arent really sure it has a purpose. Its also not nearly as functional. If only a few vendors accept Bitcoin, nobody accepts Litecoin. That could change, and the shift could be an easy one, especially for those who already accept any digital currency. This makes its future much harder to predict, since it has no real identity of its own. But Litecoin may continue to exist simply because Bitcoin does.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-... 12/3/2013
Peercoin: Actually green Price: $3.51 Market Cap: $73,096,656 Peercoin, the third largest cryptocurrency, is another Bitcoin clone with only a couple of distinguishing features. The first is that theres no hard limit on the total number of peercoins mined and it's designed to eventually attain an inflation rate of one percent. This feature could theoretically boost Peercoins longevity. And while Peercoin initially employs the same mining template as Bitcoin, the plan is eventually to transition from a proof-of-work mining setup to proof-of-stake. Rather than requiring processing power, the Peercoin algorithm is calculated based on the size of your holdings. So if you own one percent of peercoins, youll generate one percent of all proof-of-stake coin blocks. It also introduces the concept of coin age, which is the amount of time your coins have stayed static. To mine, you spend the combined ages of your coins, which determines the probability of mining success. Attempting to mine and sending coins will reset their age. The benefit of this system is that it reduces energy waste, a criticism of Bitcoin mining, and addresses the 51 percent attack vulnerability (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-bitcoin-could-die) by making it much more expensive, relatively speaking, to take over the system. It also has a more consistent fee structure, which could incidentally lead to lower comparable transaction fees in the future. Peercoin has yet to transition to this system so mining currently mirrors that of Bitcoin, which means its dominated by ASICs. Once that transition happens, Peercoin could be an easy choice for environmentally conscious cryptocurrency fans, you know, as a way to express themselves. And like Litecoin, Peercoins survival hinges largely on Bitcoins continued success. Its price, about $3.50, got a nice boost after being mentioned in The New York Times (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/in-bitcoins-orbit-rival-virtual-currencies-vie-foracceptance/).
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-... 12/3/2013
Namecoin: More than money Price: $6.91 Market Cap: $51,210,571 As the fourth most popular crytocurrency, Namecoin is the first prominent iteration of the Bitcoin model that provides functionality beyond payments. While Namecoin can also be used as a currency, its purpose is to manage information access rather than money. In its current iteration, it utilizes all of the same Bitcoin principles to serve as a distributed Domain Name System (DNS) for the top level .bit domain. In other words, its a peer-to-peer version of ICANN. Domain names are registered for a fee of 0.01 namecoins and recorded and maintained on the blockchain. New transactions occur when users transfer their domain name rights. Everything else works just like Bitcoin. The benefits of this DNS system versus a centralized one, like ICANN, is that it prevents internet censorship and theoretically reduces downtimes. But since domains are cheap and cannot be seized, cybersquatting is rampant by early adopters. Namecoin is compelling because it proves just how versatile the decentralized Bitcoin model is. Beyond DNS, a similar system could be employed to manage logins, torrent trackers, or even decentralized emailall while maintaining the functionality of a currency. As such, its one of the only clones that may survive even if Bitcoin fails. Moreover, expect to see further variations of the system. As it turns out, Bitcoin is about more than just money.
Primecoin: For science! Price: $5.45 Market Cap: 17,511,483 As mentioned earlier, one of the primary drawbacks of Bitcoin is that the mining system is a complete and utter waste of energy. And as Bitcoin expands, so does the waste, which is obviously a net loss for the environment. Those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the mining model will often suggest incorporating mining with useful systems of distributed computing like SETI@home (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/) and folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu/), where people can contribute their spare processing power to help find aliens or simulate protein folding.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-... 12/3/2013
Ripple: Everyone's a bank Price: $0.023 Market Cap: $2,311,810,087 Ripple is perhaps the most intriguing contender among the most popular altcoins, if only because its the only one that doesnt resemble Bitcoin, and one thats already attracted millions in venture capital from prominent firms like Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture, The Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. Its uniqueness, of course, poses its own problems, in that most people arent sure what it exactly is. Rather than competing with Bitcoin directly, Ripple is meant to complement other currencies, both virtual and fiat, by acting as a decentralized payment system and exchange. Ripple is technically an internet protocol, like HTTP and TCP/IP, which are used to relay websites and data, respectively, in a standardized fashion. Ripple is designed to send and receive payments. A good way to wrap your head around it is to think of email. Using your Gmail account, you can send email to your moms Yahoo account or even to that dude still using AOL. Ripple functions in a similar manner. No matter what provider or financial institution you use, youll be able to send money using the Ripple protocol.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-... 12/3/2013
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-... 12/3/2013
Tags: cryptocurrencies (/tag/cryptocurrencies), bitcoin (/tag/bitcoin), Litecoin (/tag/Litecoin), Peercoin (/tag/Peercoin), primecoin (/tag/primecoin), ripple (/tag/ripple), Namecoin (/tag/Namecoin)
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http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-... 12/3/2013
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The prices here look incorrect or at least significantly out of date. I assume this was pre-written some days ago and nobody bothered to update the coin prices before posting? Reply 1 Like Follow Post November 30 at 1:51pm
Dean Moore How soon will it be before the stock market accepts Bitcoins or fractions of a Bitcoin to buy stocks and dollars are no longer accepted? Reply 1 Like Follow Post November 30 at 7:54pm
Abdul Rehman Litecoin is second most popular virtual coin; created by former googler; good for fast moving transactions. This is a speculative high risk investment. I would recommend investing $1000 and see what happens (if you can take the risk) http://www.litecoinfaq.com Reply Like Follow Post November 30 at 10:36am Til Kim Top Commenter Newark, New Jersey
As soon as people figure out a way to "counterfeit" BitCoins (if it hasn't happened already) or any of these other alternatives, you know you're all fucked, right? Reply Like Follow Post Edited November 30 at 4:08am Michael Oost Bitcoins are computationally impossible to counterfeit. USD have been counterfeited for decades. Who's fucked? Reply Til Kim 6 Like November 30 at 7:02am Top Commenter Newark, New Jersey
USD? You mean the currency used to give the BitCoin its monetary value? Reply Like November 30 at 7:05am Hong La Follow City of Bradford 195 subscribers
Til Kim bitcoin can be exchanged for a basket of currencies Reply Like December 1 at 1:51am View 3 more Kristal Joy Dela Cruz Follow Top Commenter Cisco Networking Academy
Good and fast transaction........ bitcoin has a long way to go http://pinoycoin.wordpress.com/about-us/ follow my blog Reply Like Follow Post November 30 at 3:27pm View 2 more
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http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-... 12/3/2013