What Are Altcoins and Why Are There Over 5,000 of Them
According to crypto market capitalisation aggregators, there are quite 5,000 cryptocurrencies alive today and over 20,000 differing types of markets. BTC is that the oldest and most known digital asset and most everything else has been typically mentioned as an “altcoin.” The term refers to any of the thousands of prevalent cryptocurrencies that aim to figure alongside bitcoin and every other, or are competing for ultimate domination.
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Since 2011, the rate of Altcoin increase has increased dramatically
Satoshi’s creation has been around for over 11 years now and there are 5,098 alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) that exist next to the creator’s invention. Cryptocurrency historians widely consider the Namecoin network because the very first altcoin and therefore the term ‘altcoin’ was allegedly first described by the developer Andrew Chow.
Namecoin was launched on April 18, 2011, and the project aims to decentralize domain registration. Between 2011 and 2014 — before the 2015 blockchain hype — the speed of Altcoin launches began to grow exponentially. After the coin name was shown and released, Bitcoin saw its birth Ripple, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, quill, MasterCoin, counterpart, and unobtainium. There are now thousands of digital currencies that used the BTC codebase and developers have changed a couple of minor details with coins like einsteinium, litecoin, dash, zcash, and novacoin. There are also forks of Ethereum (ETH) with networks like ubiq, ethereum classic, and wanchain. Bytecoin has a unique codebase and also has a plethora of forks including monero, boolberry, and electroneum.
Ripple has a stellar fork and NXT has forks like nem, ardor and burst. When you travel further down the rabbit hole, you will also find tokens created by networks like Tron, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum using the TRC20, SLP or ERC20 token standards. Some forks were born directly from the codebase hosted on sites like Github and some forks are created by a blockchain diverging into two different chains. If a group of people tweak the original code and run the software differently than the main consensus rules, they will fork off into a new blockchain scheme.
A Number of Cryptocurrencies Are Dead, But That’s Not Stopping Developers from Creating a far better Bitcoin
Today, the thousands of digital assets alive are tallied together on market valuation websites like coinmarketcap.com, markets.bitcoin.com, and messari.io. Out of all the cryptocurrencies traded on the open market, the valuation of all 5000+ coins in existence is around $285 billion today. The BTC network captures around 63% of the general market capitalisation with its net value at $183 billion. A December, 2013 historical snapshot from coinmarketcap.com shows that the highest ten cryptocurrency market caps were tons different than they're today. BTC only had a valuation of around $13 billion in December 2013 and therefore the altcoins beneath it were totally different coins than today’s
If Satoshi Nakamoto was a genius, people probably wonder why there are thousands of digital tokens within the cryptoconomy. A few people know what they are and where they came from but often think about why altcoins exist. There are many reasons why altcoins exist and its mainly because people can do what they need during this permissionless environment. But also, some individuals, groups, and developers believe they will create a cryptocurrency project that outpaces BTC or they’ve created a coin to supply compatibility, but also different features than BTC.
Some projects claim to supply better anonymity and a few coins aim to tackle a selected industry like entertainment. There are digital assets that provide people with the ability to create their own tokens and develop smart contracts as well. Altcoins exist because Satoshi not only unveiled the Bitcoin network, but the anonymous creator also opened a kind of Pandora’s box in the worlds of tech and finance. Now that the box is open, there’s no going back and it doesn’t seem like the rate of altcoin issuance is slowing down any time soon.
What do you think about the thousands of altcoins in existence? Why do you think there are so many cryptocurrencies in existence today? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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