Map of coins | Hacker News Reader

Map of coins

mapofcoins.com

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Oh, cryptocurrencies, not coins; and lineage, not map.

Was really looking forward to a comparison of the historical range of the shekel vs. the denarius.

Same. This is why I clicked.

When I see something about coins online and it isn't about cryptocurrency, I get a similar feeling.

I can't find Ethereum on this diagram. Is this just for Bitcoin and its forks?

Maybe that's because the site is rather outdated, look at the timeline on the left (latest data from 2015 for the BTC map, and 2014 for most of the others).

Wow, there are a lot more than I imagined. What is the point of many of these? Do they have special purposes or something else that is not obvious?

You press fork on github. You write some catchy posts. In one way or another you distribute a few million coins while keeping a few million yourself. Now you sell. That's the shitty side of it and it's a little bit more involved but not much. On the more legitimate side of it it's a way to raise public cash for software projects.

Someone said to me recently that ICOs are for software raising money... but isn't bitcoin alone perfect for that? Just creat an address and everyone can donate?

Plus you get much less overhead because you dont need to fork the coin and set up miners and blah blah...

Often founders (used to?) pre-mine (i.e. mine coins before releasing the currency to the public), or set their currency up to give them a given percentage of all mined coins.

Assuming you can create enough hype for your new coin, this can be much more profitable than just taking donations/funding through a BTC wallet.

I'd encourage you to give the last few episodes of the YC podcast a listen, the ones on cryptocurrencies. While there is nothing fundamentally new about the mechanisms, there is a fundamental shift in who you have to trust for the transactions. I can't possibly explain this better in a comment than the podcasts or the great number of posts on the subject.

Ah but donating is not at all what they are doing. The main motive for taking part of an ico is return of investment not altruism. They are early adopters of your ponyous coin in the hope that ponyous coins will be worth 100x in a year and they can all buy lamborghinis. Results will vary.

That is the recipe from years ago. People have made it even easier nowadays.

Each coin tries to solve different issues with Bitcoin. This article has a brief summary for some of them: https://jonhq.com/looking-at-the-top-100-altcoins-by-the-pro...

And for every coin that tries to solve different issues with Bitcoin (or I'd also argue tries to apply the tech to a specific problem using block chain, i.e. smart contracts, storage, scientific research, etc), there's 20+ "me too!" copycat coins. Basically like everything that exists ever (games, movies, music, books, apps, businesses, etc).

https://xkcd.com/927/

Don't even need to click to know which xkcd this is about. Is it bad to know that xkcd number by heart?

A lot (most?) of the coins on the bitcoin page are dead. Many were created as thinly veiled, MLM/HYIP/pump and dump schemes.

It should show popularity or trading volume. Most of these coins are quite useless, practically speaking.

This really crystallizes for me how out of hand cryptocurrencies have gotten, thanks!

wait until you learn about these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currencies

Nice, but a little disappointing that it only goes as recent as April 2015.

That's only on the BTC map. The other maps don't even go that far. Unfortunately.

I think cryptocurrencies count as temes, the third replicator in a succession after genes and memes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ_9-Qx5Hz4

Where is DMT, Digital Monetary Trust? The DMT rand?

It should be there somewhere between 2000-2004

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Monetary_Trust

It's worth noting that the timeline on the left hand side suggests that the list was last updated September 2015.

This would explain why some more recent cryptocurrencies such as Zcash (ZEC) are missing.

What does a line connection mean?

How are the coins connected. For example, BTC being mined via GPU was a big problem. It lead to TBX using scrypt PoW instead of SHA 256d. Later came LTC which also used the same PoW. This was further forked to create clones.

It makes more sense if you click TECHNOLOGIES -> NXT - here you can see a less dense map

forks on github.

MRS should be MARS

lovely!

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