Bitcoin, altcoins and the future of cryptocurrency

When speaking about cryptocurrencies, there's so it seems; or bitcoin and then there's everything else. At the time of writing, CoinMarketCap records a total of 646 digital monies beginning with ether, bitcoin, ripple, litecoin and dashboard, and ending with BTCtalkcoin, the entire market cap being US$8,037,837,453.

New altcoins are being created on a regular basis and for reasons that are very varied. More recently, on 7 March 2016, Nevacoin presented and was established as “the first decentralized cryptocurrency to be created as a present for someone else's birthday.”

Altcoins or a case of arrested development?

Before this year Jamie Holmes proposed that altcoins will find another rise during 2016 in relation to how they reply to present issues of the bitcoin community, like, for example, the increasing centralisation of the bitcoin job, the constant discussions concerning the block size, or the risk of corporate management of mining. Holmes singled out spreadcoin, ripple, ether and decred as altcoins worth seeing in 2016. Likewise, Jeff Garzik called a “second tide of altcoins and program tokens supported his prediction by referring to developing applications “that lets anyone begin their own side chain or counterparty and ” -like metacoin.”

The problem lies in the fact quite few of them could be used to buy goods or services and the bulk of altcoins are now changed mainly for BTC. The popular webcast claims that one of the most significant tasks ahead for users and altcoin originators is additional advancement and development of the accompanying infrastructures, including payment processors, mobile wallets, and proprietary exchanges.