What is Altcoin ?
Any other cryptocoin which is not Bitcoin is Altcoin. Altcoin in crypto currency means alternative to Bitcoin. Altcoins in essence function as Bitcoins but may have improvements in the speed of transactions, encryption and better distribution methods.
Most of the Altcoins are a variant of Bitcoins that uses the open sourced protocol but with changed underlying codes.This results in an entirely new coin with different set of features. They also involve a mining process and offer efficient and cheap ways to carry out transactions on the web.
Alternatives to Bitcoin
There are thousands of cryptocurrency alternatives to Bitcoin available today each with unique differences, functionalities, and purposes. Some of the Altcoins also offer a versatile programing language to build applications on it like Ethereum. However there are also several Altcoins that do not have much to offer and they simple tweak some parameters that don’t matter much, or offer something that may sound useful but is not.
Many Altcoins promise useful features but one must inspect an Altcoin closely to be sure. The exchange rate is often more volatile and maybe driven exclusively by speculation, so one must be aware and do research before investing.
Important facts about Altcoin
- Since Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency, it becomes expensive and competitive for beginners and amateurs to get into this extremely competitive Bitcoin market.
- There are thousands of different Altcoins with different popularity, price and technical specifications.
- Many Altcoins uses the Bitcoin hashing algorithm SHA-256. Other popular hashing algorithm is SHA-512.
- For a list of current cryptocurrencies, check out Coinmarketcap.com