BitCoin may be the most popular digital currency but it is getting harder and harder to mine. Today, there are so called ‘Professional Miners’ with dedicated hardware mining BitCoins, our average household computer doesn’t have the computing power to compete, not even those with 3 SLi NVidia Graphic Cards. Because the entry barrier gets higher and higher as the pool of BitCoin available for mining shrinks.
For those still interested in Digital Currency, also known as Cryptocurrency , here are 10 alternative digital coins. They are easier to mine, however, the down side is these companies might cease to exist if their popularity wanes. Which is the biggest alternative digital currency? Here are the Top 100 Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations:
- Dash
Dash (DASH) is an open sourced, privacy-centric digital currency with instant transactions. It allows you to keep your finances private as you make transactions without waits, similar to cash.
PRIVATE – Keep your payments private so nobody can track you thanks to Darksend.
LOW FEES – Much lower than banks or credit cards, often even free.
INSTANT – Payments are received instantly by the other party thanks to InstantX.
PEER TO PEER – Uses a decentralized network, so no centralized third party to trust.
SECURE – Advanced encryption and a 2-tier network for complete security.
GLOBAL – You can send money anywhere in the world.
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02 – Safecoin | Self-Encryption Digital Token
Safecoin is a digital token. It can be thought of as the oil in the engine of the SAFE Network, a built in way of ensuring that all users of the network are compensated for the value they provide. Let’s find out how it works. Safecoins are distributed entirely by the algorithms within the SAFE Network. Human beings are not involved in the process. Only 4.3 billion coins will ever be in circulation at one time and each will have its own unique identity. Safecoins will be recycled when users exchange them for network services, ensuring there is always a supply for users to earn.
Login and secure your data with no middle man.
Self-Encryption: Data which encrypts itself, with itself.
Distributed network with opportunistic data caching.
Data availability and built-in redundancy.
Unneeded duplicates are automatically removed.
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03 – Steem | Blockchain Based Social Media Currency
Steem is a blockchain-based social media platform where anyone can earn rewards. Cryptocurrency tipping platforms require users to give something up to reward other for their contributions. With Steem, rewarding others is as simple as voting for a post, such you may on Reddit, or as you would Like a post on Facebook. The blockchain distributes payouts as 50% Steem Power for voting and 50% Steem Dollars. Rewards are distributed by the blockchain, similar to how miners are paid by Bitcoin, and occur roughly 24 hours after content and votes have been submitted. Steem is a form of esteem, which means to prize or value. Steem is also a homophone for steam, which is frequently associated with power, and a step further, steam powered trains gave influence to English idioms, such as ‘this conversation is picking up steam.’ The associations with prizing, language and empowerment only felt right.
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04 – Litecoin | Open Source P2P Digital Currency
Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. Litecoin is an open source, global payment network that is fully decentralized without any central authorities. Mathematics secures the network and empowers individuals to control their own finances. Litecoin features faster transaction confirmation times and improved storage efficiency than the leading math-based currency. With substantial industry support, trade volume and liquidity, Litecoin is a proven medium of commerce complementary to Bitcoin.
Open Source Software – Litecoin is an open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license which gives you the power to run, modify, and copy the software and to distribute, at your option, modified copies of the software. The software is released in a transparent process that allows for independent verification of binaries and their corresponding source code.
Blockchain – The Litecoin blockchain is capable of handling higher transaction volume than its counterpart – Bitcoin. Due to more frequent block generation, the network supports more transactions without a need to modify the software in the future. As a result, merchants get faster confirmation times, while still having ability to wait for more confirmations when selling bigger ticket items.
Wallet Encryption – Wallet encryption allows you to secure your wallet, so that you can view transactions and your account balance, but are required to enter your password before spending litecoins. This provides protection from wallet-stealing viruses and trojans as well as a sanity check before sending payments.
Mining Reward – Miners are currently awarded with 25 new litecoins per block, an amount which gets halved roughly every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks). The Litecoin network is therefore scheduled to produce 84 million litecoins, which is 4 times as many currency units as Bitcoin.
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05 – Peercoin | Secure & Sustainable Cryptocoin
Peercoin seeks to be the most secure cryptocoin at the lowest cost, rewarding all users for strengthening the network by giving them a 1% annual PPC return when minting. Peercoin is one of the truly unique alternative coins. Although its code is based on Bitcoin, Peercoin is the first coin to introduce Proof of Stake to secure the network. Proof of Work is also used in Peercoin, to promote fair coin distribution, but is not necessary for the security of the network.
Fair Distribution – Proof of Work mining is used to spread the distribution of new coins, while the security of the network is maintained entirely by Proof of Stake minting. This means that Bitcoin mining vulnerabilities such as Selfish Mining do not impact Peercoin security.
Compatible with Bitcoin – Peercoin uses the same mining algorithm as Bitcoin, known as SHA-256. Any hardware that works on the Bitcoin network can also be used to mine Peercoins.
Sustainable Reward – The reward for mining a block gradually declines as the computing power of the network grows. Over time, mining will have an ever-decreasing impact on the growth of the money supply.
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06 – Namecoin | Decentralize all the things!
Namecoin is an experimental open-source technology which improves decentralization, security, censorship resistance, privacy, and speed of certain components of the Internet infrastructure such as DNS and identities. Namecoin was the first fork of Bitcoin and still is one of the most innovative “altcoins”. It was first to implement merged mining and a decentralized DNS. Namecoin was also the first solution to Zooko’s Triangle, the long-standing problem of producing a naming system that is simultaneously secure, decentralized, and human-meaningful. What can Namecoin be used for?
Protect free-speech rights online by making the web more resistant to censorship.
Attach identity information such as GPG and OTR keys and email, Bitcoin, and Bitmessage addresses to an identity of your choice.
Human-meaningful Tor .onion domains.
Decentralized TLS (HTTPS) certificate validation, backed by blockchain consensus.
Access websites using the .bit top-level domain.
Proposed ideas such as file signatures, voting, bonds/stocks/shares, web of trust, notary services, and proof of existence.
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07 – Primecoin | Innovative Cryptocurrency
Advantages of Primecoin – The innovative prime proof-of-work in Primecoin not only provides security and minting to the network, but also generates a special form of prime number chains of interest to mathematical research. Thus primecoin network is energy-multiuse, compared to bitcoin.
Value Behind Primecoin – Primecoin network searches for special prime number chains known as Cunningham chains and bi-twin chains. The distribution of these prime chains are not well-understood currently as even for its simplest case twin primes their infinite existence is not proven.
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08 – Novacoin | Scrypt Hashing BitCoins
Novacoin is the coin of the feature. It’s unique way of utilizing both Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake for block generation with separated target limits make it stand out. Though Novacoin is similar to PPCoin in some things but it’s a project with own ideology and independent codebase, that’s why it’s hard to perform such comparison. We can say definitely, that:
Novacoin uses newer version of bitcoin as the base.
NovaCoin has a different emission model (floating reward per coin-year).
NovaCoin uses scrypt hashing function for proof-of-work.
NovaCoin uses the both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake for chain trust score computation.
NovaCoin has separated target limits for proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.
NovaCoin has no proof-of-work block signatures.
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09 – feathercoin | Open Source Internet Currency
An Internet currency free from any central bank or institution. feathercoin bypasses the old banking system by using peer-to-peer technology. Payments are borderless and can be processed by anyone with affordable computer hardware using free software. This work is rewarded with new feathercoins which are issued by the network. Feathercoin is based on NeoScrypt and implements many features not seen in the majority of crypto coins. We have open source projects for ATM’s and Point of Sales equipment, t-shirt wallets, laser etched physical Feathercoins and Raspberry Pi based projects. There really are too many things to list but here are some of the technical aspects which differentiate Feathercoin from most.
NeoScrypt Algorithm
Current Gen ASIC resistance
80 Coin reward per block
336 million coins total
Block target is 1.0 minutes
Block reward halves every 2,100,000 blocks
Retarget every block with 15, 120 and 480 block averages and 25% damping.
Default Feathercoin network port is 9336
Default RPC mining port is 9337
eHRC (enhanced Hash Rate Compensation)
ACP (Advanced Checkpointing)
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10 – Ethereum Classic | 2nd Biggest Digital Currency
Emergence of Ethereum Classic created a huge opportunity for miners. ETC is presently one of the most profitable tokens to mine and is attracting substantial hash power with zero switching cost. As a miner, it’s in your best interests to support ETC because Ethereum Foundation is going to abandon its miners very soon, switching to experimental PoS model. Ethereum Classic will continue employing robust and time-tested PoW security model, rewarding miners for ensuring the future of the original chain. Do it for profit and principles; mine Ethereum Classic today!