The name ALTCOINS is used to describe any cryptocurrency coin that is not Bitcoin.
After the successful launch of Bitcoin and its global acceptance as a crypto currency, many other alternative cryptocurrencies were born using the Bitcoin Cryptographic Hash Algorithm or the newly developed Cryptographic Hash Algorithms such as Ethash, Groestl, Scrypt, X11 Blake etc.
As a result, these new crypto currencies were named ALTCOINS as an abbreviation of “alternative coins”.
Much more than a copy of Bitcoin
At the time of writing (January 2018), there are about 1380 altcoins available for use today.
Altcoins are powerful alternative to the Bitcoin, as today (January 8, 2018) the Altcoins Percentage of the Total Market Capitalization (Dominance) is about 70%, leaving only 30% dominance for the Bitcoin.
While many are still struggling to gain the popularity of bitcoin or in general some popularity, some are doing truly amazing things with the new ecosystem technology, trying to take the market cap top spot from bitcoin.
According to the coinmarketcap.com the top altcoins are listed below.
The top altcoin today is Ethereum, followed by Ripple.