Slashdot Mirror
How To Create Your Own Cryptocurrency
mspohr writes "Since the code for Bitcoin is open source, we have seen the creation of various Bitcoin clones and enhancements (Litecoin, Dogecoin or Coinye West, anyone?... There are about 70 listed on this site.) This article explains the process of making your own. Thanks to Matt Corallo, a veteran Bitcoin developer, you can easily create your own at coingen.io. He has automated the process of modifying the source code to create custom currencies. Just enter in the name for your new currency, a logo image and set a few parameters (or accept the defaults), and you can have your own cryptocurrency. Source code and some customizations cost a bit extra. Once you have your own 'coin,' you just need to convince people that it is worth something."
As I noted on Bitcontalk to someone who bought Bitcoins for over $1000 each, "Great! We need suckers like you to keep this thing going!".
At least that's more visually appealing than the goddamn Slashdot beta site.
Bitcoin. The best pyramid scheme since I can't remember when.
Once Kim Dotcom gets that whole mess worked out with the US DOJ, he can make his own cryptocurrency.
And depending on how he ties it to his services, I bet people will use it and/or find it valuable.
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What happens when Bitcoin goes over $2000? Or what happens when it goes over $50,000? Or what happens when it goes over $200,000? And what if that all happens within the next year?
That "sucker" you were referring to could very well be a very astute investor.
Until sufficient time has passed, you won't know for sure the long-term value of that investment. While it could be a very poor one, it could also turn out to be a very, very lucrative one. Only time will tell, my friend. Only time will tell.
I'm in the process of making a coin! I named it HLC or HighlanderCoin, it's halves every 500000 and has an initial block value of 0.000001 HLC. Best part is, there can be only 1!
I imagine for most people in the future, the point of crypto currency is not to speculate or profit from mining, but to facilitate a sort of cash analogue online. Having a load of different currencies might introduce an element of stability which is lacking in Bitcoin.
It might be interesting to see these new currencies made completely fiat. Mining seems to just waste energy, since the scarcity (unlike say, gold) doesn't actually stabilise the price, as Bitcoin has demonstated.
I imagine the problem then is converting the myriad of cryptocurrencies back into "hard" money.
To educate people into not using altcoins.
Bitcoin and its imitators are open source. The web app that the article is about allows one to generate their own altcoin for 0.01 BTC, with the release of the source code for your custom altcoin costing extra. I'm not sure if the licensing of Bitcoin allows you to distribute a derivative without source, but even if it did no one would take it seriously. Even Dogecoin provides source.
Flame away, but I think the whole trend of digital currencies is stupid. It basically comes down to people tasked their computers with solving math problems. Okay, big deal. Whoopie for those people. Their math problems are not worth anything. The inverse of the old saying, "Nothing of value was lost." fits here. Nothing of value was created.
People want to trade one fiat currency, for another? Okay. What's the point?
Our economic challenge is one of resource scarcity. Coming up with schemes to trade compute time for fiat paper is not doing anyone any good.... With the exception of those few who are fortunate enough to convince some suckers to trade their paper for solutions to complex math problems.
Well, here's a new section for my "beating down democracy" book.
Suppose you want to discredit crypto-currencies, or at least dilute their effect. What can you do?
You can start a raft of new currencies with sketchy names and origins. Currencies based on celebrities, currencies based on businesses, sports (such as Nascar commemorative plates - good as gold in many US locations), and even personal currencies!
"We can't stop people from using BitCoin! What can we do?"
"Let's generate alternatives - so many that people won't know which ones to use."
"You mean like software standards?"
"Yes - exactly like software standards."
"Heh. They'll never see that coming..."
I found mutiple errors in the first paragraph of the paper. That does not engender trust in the quality of the authors work. The first paragraph of the paper states:
> Every four years the number of bitcoins created is scheduled to be cut in half until 2040
The correct date is approximately 2140 AD. The reward per block started at 50 BTC and is cut in half every 210,000 blocks, which nominally takes about 4 years. After ~130 years you have done 33 halvings, so the reward is 50 / (2^33) = 0.58 Satoshi, where 100 million Satoshi = 1 bitcoin. Since the smallest unit in the bitcoin transaction system is 1 Satoshi, the reward becomes too small to measure, and thus mining for new coins stops.
> Mining is done by volunteers who operate servers running bitcoin software.
Three errors in one sentence. Most miners do it for income, not volunteering. They earn a share of the block reward by participating in mining pools. They don't use servers, they used to use graphics cards until that became too difficult, and now mostly use custom hardware (ASICs). Neither are servers in the client-server sense, they are nodes in a peer-to-peer network, because they have to receive new transactions and send completed blocks to the other nodes. Miners generally don't run "bitcoind", the default client, or other wallet software. They run custom mining software for the kind of mining hardware they use.
Might I recommend this one instead: http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=scrypt_altcoin_cloning_guide Written by yours truly back in May. Source is no longer on line for the examples (foocoin) but there's so many clones out there, one can use any of them.
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
It sounds like a good idea for some cases, like for custom in-game currencies, and for 'private groups' of people.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No. The people who mined or bought bitcoin more than a year ago have made a shitload of money.
Such clones do not address the point of money creation control. It is always a technical question, while it should be a political question, controlled by the citizen for the general interest. Why should money creation policy be more technical and shielded from citizen will than any other policy or law?
One could answer that central banks of developed countries are independent, so that their money creation policy is also a technical question, and the article notes that. Indeed bitcoin and friends are as undemocratic as the Euro, which is not an achievement.
I love the idea of Gridcoin, but the implementation is shocking. For a start, way too much trust is placed in the client to identify BIONC and increase rewards. This will get hacked so you don't have to run BOINC. Also, it only cares about CPU usages. I have a 2000-series ATI card that's no good for hashing, but will accelerate SETI@home. The Gridcoin client doesn't consider I'm doing work if I'm using a GPU, so I'm encouraged to drop GPU accelerated work and use a less efficient CPU. Not to mention that mining with the wallet is the only way to earn a bonus, making a range of hardware useless, plus making pools unattractive.