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Altcoin

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What Is An Altcoin?

What Is An Altcoin?

An altcoin, short for alternative coin, is any cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin and refers to the hundreds of other digital currencies that have emerged in an attempt to “fix” bitcoin.

Some altcoins are created in an attempt to “fix” Bitcoin by doing something that Bitcoin doesn’t such as faster/cheaper transactions or more “environment friendly”. While many may have their beginnings based on good intentions, almost all of them end up as a way to scam people out of their money, through things like pre-mining, rug pulls, exit scams, or promises of guaranteed returns through grandiose marketing schemes.

As a result, altcoins have earned the title shitcoins because they are worthless garbage.

Types Of Altcoins

Altcoins come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. Some are payment tokens meant to be used as a form of currency, while others are so-called DeFi tokens that are intended to be used for decentralized finance applications. Others are known as stable coins, which are designed to maintain a stable value regardless of market conditions and act as a sort of fiat currency on a blockchain. Meme coins are yet another type of altcoin that were created as a joke and have gained popularity due to the nature of internet culture and the unfortunate promotion from billionaires such as Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. Finally there are NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which can represent just about anything from digital art to in-game items.

Some of the most dangerous altcoins are simply forks of Bitcoin, meaning they share many of the same features and codebase and often try to use Bitcoin’s name as a means of luring unsuspecting newcomers to purchase them.

What separates Bitcoin from these fork scam coins is that the decentralized network of bitcoin nodes and immense amount of energy that is expended by in miners cannot simply be duplicated whenever the bitcoin software is forked.