Get Trading Recommendations and Read Analysis on Hacked.com for just $39 per month.Litecoin is the biggest Altcoin

Even if they do not accurately understand how it works, most people are at least somewhat familiar with Bitcoin. However, once they begin to get involved with cryptocurrency, they may be surprised to learn that there are actually hundreds of types of cryptocurrencies known as altcoins. Altcoins are anintriguingfacet of the cryptocurrency landscape, but they are not foreveryone. Altcoin newcomers often have many questions, and this guide will provide a brief overview of altcoins to help beginners decide whether or not to invest in them as part of their cryptocurrency portfolio.

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The word altcoin is an abbreviation of Bitcoin alternative, and thus describes every single cryptocurrency except for Bitcoin. Altcoins are referred to as Bitcoin alternatives because, at least to some extent, most altcoins hope to either replace or improve upon at least one Bitcoin component.

There are hundreds of altcoins (CoinMarketCap listed 478 at the time this guide was written), and more appear each day. Mostaltcoins are little more than Bitcoin clones, changing only minor characteristics such as its transactions speed, distribution method, or hashing algorithm. Most of these coins do not survive for very long. One exception is Litecoin, which was one of the first altcoins.In addition to using a different hashing algorithm than Bitcoin, Litecoin has a much higher number of currency units. For this reason, Litecoin has branded itself as silver to Bitcoins gold.

However, some altcoins innovate by experimenting with useful features Bitcoin does not offer. For example, Darkcoin hopes to provide a platform for completely anonymous transactions, BitShares describes itself as a fair version of Wall Street, and Ripple serves as a protocol users can employ to make inter-currency payments with ease. Some altcoin ecosystems, such as CounterParty and Mastercoin, even utilize the Bitcoin blockchain to secure their platform.

Many Bitcoin enthusiasts argue that altcoins are completely unnecessary and will not succeed because they cannot rival the infrastructure Bitcoin boasts. However, altcoins serve an important role. Decentralization is one of Bitcoins most prominent goals, and altcoins further decentralize the cryptocurrency community. Moreover, altcoins allow developers to experiment with unique features. While it is true that Bitcoin can copy these features if the developers or community desires, fully-functioning altcoins are much better cryptocurrency laboratories than Bitcoins testnet. Finally, Altcoins give Bitcoin healthy competition. Altcoins give cryptocurrency users alternative options and forces Bitcoins developers to remain active and continue innovating. If users do not feel that Bitcoin satisfies their digital desires, they can adopt an altcoin. If enough users left Bitcoin for a particular altcoin, the Bitcoin developers would have to adopt the features the community desired or risk losing its place as the preeminent cryptocurrency.

Created in April 2011, Namecoin was the first altcoin. Although it also functions as a currency, Namecoins primary purpose is to decentralize domain-name registration, which makes internet censorship much more difficult. As its place among the top ten cryptocurrency market caps suggests, Namecoin has remained one of the most successful altcoins throughout its short lifespan.

Due to how recent cryptocurrency was invented and how rapidly the landscape changes, all cryptocurrency investments carry a great deal of risk. Even Bitcoinby far the most stable cryptocurrencyexhibits price volatility on a regular basis.

By comparison, however, altcoins are exponentially more volatile. Because they have such low market caps (the total value of all coins combined), altcoin markets are highly prone to price manipulation. Wealthy traderscolloquially called whalesoften inject large amounts of capital into low-priced coins to build hype and cause the price to skyrocket. Once the price has risen considerably, the whales sell their coins on exchanges at a massive profit, hurting many gullible investors in the process. This method is known as a pump and dump. Not only does this hurt greedy traders who did not take the time to do their homework, but it often proves to be the breath of an altcoins brief lifespan.

To avoid losing all your money in a pump and dump, focus on long-term investments in coins you believe have immense potential and exhibit overall health. Generally, healthy altcoins possess strong communities, exhibit high liquidity, and have developers who proactively improve the coins source code (though not necessary, many users also prefer developers who reveal their true identities).CoinGeckos comprehensive coin metric analysis algorithm statistically analyzes these three important factors and ranks coins according to overall strength.

If you do choose to invest in altcoins, it is important to remember somebasic tenets of investing. Avoid the hype that coin communities propagate. Investors have an agenda, so you should not take their word at face value. Only invest in coins you have researched. It is unwiseto invest in something you do not understand. Making an ill-informed investment is the first step to losing your hard-earned money. Take the time to research the coins you are considering for long-term investments, and research day-trading before you attempt to become a high-volume, short-term trader. Most importantly, never invest more than you can afford to lose. Far too many people have lost their life savings by centralizing them in volatile investments.

As with Bitcoin, there are a variety of ways to obtain altcoins. The most basic way to obtain altcoins is to accept them as payment for goods or services. If you are interested in doing this, place an ad showcasing your skill-set ona cryptocurrency job board.

You can also trade for altcoins on cryptocurrency exchanges. Most exchange use Bitcoin as an intermediary (although a few include fiat pairs), so if you do not already own bitcoins you will need to buy some before you can trade for altcoins. Some of the most-trafficked exchanges include BTER,Bittrex, MintPal,Cryptsy, and BTC38 (Chinese-only).

Many altcoin communities also sponsor giveaways to increase exposure of their coin and enticenew users to join their communities. This is a great way to acquire coins if you are low on fundsor do not have marketable skills.

Featured images from Shutterstock.

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What is an Altcoin? - ccn.com

Zecoex, as with some other exchanges, started with the promoters getting besotted with bitcoins and wanting to buy some. But we had no idea what bitcoin was and how it worked. We could never place reliance on any other exchange with so many horror stories, so we decided to buy our first bitcoin and start building our own technical expertise on blockchain, and transactions.

We read and read and read, and came to the conclusion that our dear world wide web confused us more, read more... and clarified so little. Our inquisite minds then went on to download various cores, and explore transactions on the core. We hired some developers and ask them to play around with our bitcoin (yes, one split into as many fractions as permissible in satoshis after paying the network fees). All of us read together under the lamp with some article from the net in our hand. And then we started experimenting.

It did work for us. We not only understood how the blockchain worked and behaved, how to transact with wallets and open source codes, how to transact directly with the cores, how to arrive at fool proof methods of keeping our coins secure and transacting with them.

This entire expertise is at your disposal.

We will shortly launch our own hardware wallets, and start a development thread. We are hoping to catch hold of some clients to pay us mega bucks for building some custom solution for them on blockchain. But till the time we get there, feel free to interact with our engineers who are eager to pass on this knowledge, and help you resolve your technical queries, whether they are complex, or straight forward.

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A modern Altcoin Core REST and RPC client to execute administrative tasks, wallet operations and queries about network and the blockchain.

Install the package via npm:

The network will automatically determine the port to connect to, just like the bitcoind and bitcoin-cli commands.

By default, when ssl is enabled, strict checking is implicitly enabled.

For compatibility with other Altcoin Core clients.

Since version v0.14.0, it is possible to send commands via the JSON-RPC interface using named parameters instead of positional ones. This comes with the advantage of making the order of arguments irrelevant. It also helps improving the readability of certain function calls when leaving out arguments for their default value.

For instance, take the getBalance() call written using positional arguments:

It is functionally equivalent to using the named arguments account and minconf, leaving out include_watchonly (defaults to false):

This feature is available to all JSON-RPC methods that accept arguments.

Due to JavaScript's limited floating point precision, all big numbers (numbers with more than 15 significant digits) are returned as strings to prevent precision loss. This includes both the RPC and REST APIs.

By default, all methods are exposed on the client independently of the version it is connecting to. This is the most flexible option as defining methods for unavailable RPC calls does not cause any harm and the library is capable of handling a Method not found response error correctly.

However, if you prefer to be on the safe side, you can enable strict version checking. This will validate all method calls before executing the actual RPC request:

If you want to enable strict version checking for the bleeding edge version, you may set a very high version number to exclude recently deprecated calls:

To avoid potential issues with prototype references, all methods are still enumerable on the library client prototype.

Start the bitcoind with the RPC server enabled and optionally configure a username and password:

These configuration values may also be set on the bitcoin.conf file of your platform installation.

By default, port 8332 is used to listen for requests in mainnet mode, or 18332 in testnet or regtest modes. Use the network property to initialize the client on the desired mode and automatically set the respective default port. You can optionally set a custom port of your choice too.

The RPC services binds to the localhost loopback network interface, so use rpcbind to change where to bind to and rpcallowip to whitelist source IP access.

All RPC methods are exposed on the client interface as a camelcase'd version of those available on bitcoind.

For a more complete reference about which methods are available, check the RPC documentation on the Altcoin Core Developer Reference website.

Batched requests are support by passing an array to the command method with a method and optionally, parameters. The return value will be an array with all the responses.

Note that batched requests will only throw an error if the batch request itself cannot be processed. However, each individual response may contain an error akin to an individual request.

Support for the REST interface is still experimental and the API is still subject to change. These endpoints are also unauthenticated so there are certain risks which you should be aware, specifically of leaking sensitive data of the node if not correctly protected.

Error handling is still fragile so avoid passing user input.

Start the bitcoind with the REST server enabled:

These configuration values may also be set on the bitcoin.conf file of your platform installation. Use txindex=1 if you'd like to enable full transaction query support (note: this will take a considerable amount of time on the first run).

Given a block hash, returns a block, in binary, hex-encoded binary or JSON formats.

Given a block hash, returns amount of block headers in upward direction.

Returns various state info regarding block chain processing.

Returns transactions in the transaction memory pool.

Returns various information about the transaction memory pool. Only supports JSON as output format.

Given a transaction hash, returns a transaction in binary, hex-encoded binary, or JSON formats.

Query unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) for a given set of outpoints. See BIP64 for input and output serialisation.

This client supports SSL out of the box. Simply pass the SSL public certificate to the client and optionally disable strict SSL checking which will bypass SSL validation (the connection is still encrypted but the server it is connecting to may not be trusted). This is, of course, discouraged unless for testing purposes when using something like self-signed certificates.

Please note that the following procedure should only be used for testing purposes.

Generate an self-signed certificate together with an unprotected private key:

On Altcoin Core <0.12, you can start the bitcoind RPC server directly with SSL:

On Altcoin Core >0.12, use must use stunnel (brew install stunnel or sudo apt-get install stunnel4) or an HTTPS reverse proxy to configure SSL since the built-in support for SSL has been removed. The trade off with stunnel is performance and simplicity versus features, as it lacks more powerful capacities such as Basic Authentication and caching which are standard in reverse proxies.

You can use stunnel by configuring stunnel.conf with the following service requirements:

The key option may be omitted if you concatenating your private and public certificates into a single stunnel.pem file.

On some versions of stunnel it is also possible to start a service using command line arguments. The equivalent would be:

Then pass the public certificate to the client:

By default, all requests made with altcoin-rpc are logged using uphold/debugnyan with altcoin-rpc as the logging namespace.

Please note that all sensitive data is obfuscated before calling the logger.

Example output defining the environment variable DEBUG=altcoin-rpc:

A custom logger can be passed via the logger option and it should implement bunyan's log levels.

Currently the test suite is tailored for Docker (including docker-compose) due to the multitude of different bitcoind configurations that are required in order to get the test suite passing.

To test using a local installation of node.js but with dependencies (e.g. bitcoind) running inside Docker:

To test using Docker exclusively (similarly to what is done in Travis CI):

MIT

Link:
GitHub - ander7agar/altcoin-rpc: A modern Bitcoin Core REST ...

With bitcoin currently consolidating above $8000 USD after establishing an all-time high of nearly $8400 USD, some liquidity has shifted towards the altcoin markets. This has resulted in several major altcoins setting record dollar-value highs despite holding relatively modest prices when paired with bitcoin. Today, Ethereum set a new all-time high of approximately $420 USD, with prices surpassing $400 USD. Dash and Monero also set a new all-time high today, with Dash testing $600 USD for the first time before retracing to approximately $570 USD, and XMR currently trading for approximately $170 USD.

Also Read:Bitcoin Skeptics Just Too Old to Get Digital World, Says Hedge Fund Mogul Novogratz

As of this writing, the price of a single bitcoin is approximately $8130 USD, following the establishment of a new all-time high of roughly $8380 USD earlier this week. The total market capitalization of bitcoin is over $136 billion USD, with 24-hour trading volume exceeding $4 billion USD.

Bitcoin experienced a dramatic November, with the markets falling by roughly 28% after setting the preceding high of $7890 USD at the beginning of the month. The dip comprised the largest red weekly candle in bitcoins history. However, after making a low of approximately $5450 USD, bitcoin quickly recovered to break above $8000 USD and produce its largest ever green weekly candle.

With Bitcoins price movements calming in recent days, some liquidity has shifted into the altcoin markets triggering the establishment of new all-time dollar highs in several major markets. Bitcoins market dominance is currently 53.1% down approximately 5% from one week ago.

Ethereum gained approximately 13% to establish a new record dollar high today. The total market cap of Ethereum now exceeds $40 billion USD, with ETH currently trading at approximately $420 USD up more than 30% since the start of the month. Earlier this week, Ethereum published the initial version of its Casperprotocol update, which was first presented at Devcon3 earlier this month.

Dash set a new record high today, currently trading at roughly $570 USD after testing $600 for the first time. Dash has rallied since breaking its preceding all-time high of approximately $400 USD on the 12th of November, after the release of Dash Core version 12.2 four days prior. Dash now has the fifth largest market capitalization with nearly $4.4 billion USD.

Monero also established a new all-time high today, with XMR currently trading at nearly $170. Monero is currently the 7th largest crypto market with a total capitalization of over $2.5 billion.

Bitcoin Cash made gains of over 20% today, with BCH currently trading for $1550. The move comes after several days of consolidation between approximately $900 $1300, which followed a more than 60% retrace from BCHs all-time high of nearly $3000 USD earlier this month. Bitcoin Cash currently boasts the third largest cryptocurrency total capitalization with $26.5 billion USD.

Dogecoin was among the top performing markets today, gaining approximately 40% to trade at over $0.0021 USD. As of this writing, Dogecoins total market capitalization is $235 million USD.

Zcash performed well during November and is currently trading at approximately $320 after increasing by over 50% this month. Grayscale Investments announced the launch of its Zcash Investment Trust towards the start of November which, following Edward Snowdens recent praise of Zcash, has likely contributed to the bullish sentiment. Zcash is 15th largest cryptocurrency market with a total capitalization of almost $880,000. Litecoin also performed well this month, gaining by approximately 25% to trade at around $75 USD. Litecoins $4.1 billion USD market cap makes it the 6th largest cryptocurrency by total capitalization.

Despite several major cryptocurrencies establishing new record highs against the dollar, the majority of altcoins have experienced sustained downtrends since midway through 2017 when paired against bitcoin. Although many altcoin/bitcoin markets have seen significant price increases in recent days, whether or not the altcoin markets can sustain dollar gains independent of a rising bitcoin remains to be seen, with some analysts speculating that the recent Tether hack may have contributed to the recent rise in altcoin prices, arguing that traders may have been purchasing cryptocurrencies to reduce USDT exposure.

Do you think the altcoin markets are heating up for another boom, or will the current momentum quickly fizzle out? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Tradingview, Coinmarketcap

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Beside Bitcoin, there are more than 3000 cryptocurrencies existing currently. To give you an easy overview, we got our Altcoin Watchlist (Alternative Cryptocurrencies so all but Bitcoin). We monitor and support the currencies listed. So in our view these currencies have to biggest longterm potencial of them all but as there are so many of them, theres no garantuee this list is complete. Please note that we are NOT an investment information source if you are loocking for a safe or insanly fast investment opportunity, theirs lots of other sources. We focus on the economic and social value of a currency, not its ROI for investors.

The criterias for currencies beeing on our Watchlist are (subject to change) :* Sourcecode for Node must be Opensource* No unreasonable Premine or concentration of Coins from the beginning / for founders (richlist)* CPU/GPU friendly algos that are ASIC-resistant as good as possible and force decentralization.* Innovative Technology that differs it from bitcoin* Does not have to be a currency, but has to have a defined purpose (e.G ETH or DCR)

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Altcoin Watchlist | Meet & Learn Cryptocurrencies