You can now create a Bitcoin clone by filling out a simple webform | Hacker News Reader

You can now create a Bitcoin clone by filling out a simple webform

coingen.io

132 pointsBlueMatt76 comments

This whole alt-coin thing is just a passing fad. I recently cashed out all my BitCoins and put the money into Beanie Baby Collectables. They're these cool stuffed toys that everybody is collecting these days. I was able to get a bunch of them at a very reasonable price range. Their value is bound to skyrocket in the future as more and more people get into it.

You should also look into the US Dollar- I hear people are going crazy over that one too... and since it's lost 98% of its value in the last 100 years it is bound to rebound any day now.

I don't understand why losing 98% of value over a 100-year period is supposed to be a pejorative. That implies a very steady, <2% rate of inflation per year, which is what allows wages to keep up with inflation.

Wait, inflation allows wages to keep up with inflation? Care to rephrase that one?

And you can print your own money by writing "This is 100 dollars bill" and sending it to printer multiple times.

The only remaining task is to convince others to use it :)

Interestingly enough, lots of consumer printing software will not print images of US currency. Photoshop will absolutely not allow you to even open images of it.

....omfg.

http://pbx.mine.nu/random/Series2004NoteFront.jpg

You are absolutely right. Newer banknotes are unable to be opened in Photoshop.

I feel dirty.

Huh, interesting. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/

What creepy version of photoshop do you use? Mine will let you paint it red too.

The standard consumer build.

http://i.imgur.com/fW7yaYU.png

CS4 was when I first encountered it.

Strange. Mine is CS5, works perfectly.

Try this one - http://pbx.mine.nu/random/Series2004NoteFront.jpg

Agreed, this is caught by photoshop. I tested with http://mrnussbaum.com/prescurr1/1.jpg . Apparently wasn't accurate enough for photoshop to complain.

What is printing software? I can Google '100 Dollar US Bill', download and print it.

I think you think printers work different than they do.

http://fstoppers.com/photoshop-wont-let-you-work-with-images...

Thanks for the link. I finally found a proper US note and the new ones are in fact blocked from being edited in Photoshop.

He's right, you are wrong. Modern color printers sold to consumers run image recognition on the images they print and refuse to print ones that contain features found in real money. Try it if you don't believe me.

They also add watermarks -- small almost imperceptible yellow dots that uniquely identify the printer in question.

I said that in the other comment above you. I knew about the yellow dots, but this is straight up creepytown.

Thanks for building this, and welcome to HN BlueMatt! If you can edit the headline, you might want to prefix with 'Show HN'.

I'm curious what does the altcoin use for peer discovery? Do you get code for a DNS seed too?

There was an interesting discussion on bitcoin-dev mailing list the last couple days about whether it makes sense to enable merge-mining on new altcoins. It's far from settled, but it's another idea for a feature you would want to toggle.... Also the scrypt difficulty parameters! OK, at some point this is just 'cheating', right? :-)

BTW, I think if you know Bitcoin enough to want to create an altcoin, you would trust Matt Corallo / BlueMatt enough to know your 0.01 BTC is safe.

EDIT: Wow, look at them go: http://coingen.io/status.html

Who runs the nodes for bootstrap?

If the server that runs this is US based and they allow trademarks through, you'll get a C&D within a week. Lawyers make their money googling for this stuff.

All someone has to do is register "paypal" or "amazon" or "exxon" etc. and the fun will be over shortly.

Creator might want to take their name and home address off the domain registration.

Displaying the names of unconfirmed entries is also probably not the best idea: http://coingen.io/status.html

Looks like someone followed the "advice" of ck2, ebaycoin, paypal and amazoncoin are in this page.

As is zoidbergcoin, which is a coin I could get behind.

Once again, the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor.

Using negative margins and thus displaying text outside of the viewable area of the page probably isn't the best idea, either. Hopefully their coin code is better than their ability to create a mobile web page.

People are so mature

I don't want to get picky, but wouldn't cloning litecoin be objectively superior? Cloning bitcoin just leaves your currency to the ASICS from the get go, at least with scrypt, everybody has a decent shot at mining early.

---

Having read the site, I noted scrypt was an option.

It should really be the default.

Otherwise Great work, this is really cool!

If the Internet has taught me anything it's that the next form of currency will be cats. You can take pictures of them, add words in impact font, or take videos of them. You then generate tons of money somehow when you mother shares them in a forwarded email (I think).

I have therefore started mining cats. Turns out when you put 30 of them in a room they generate more 'interest' than the best Bitcoin mining outfits.

There's a coin for that! http://catcoins.biz/

Good luck convincing Winklevii to buy $11 million worth of cats.

Why there is not a bcrypt option for Proof of Work Algorithm? (Technical question: There are a lot of AltCoins out there. Why no one proposed a AltCoin where the Proof of Work Algorithm is based in bcrypt?)

Because as far as I know no altcoin has implemented that so OP couldn't easily copy that. (Also why would another altcoin implement it as scrypt has the advantage of being memory hard.)

There is a proposal to switch litecoin to another proof-of-work that would be asic resistant since scrypt asic is going to ship in 90 days or so.

a lot of them use scrypt, so you can't use asic mining. in my opinion that is the single biggest flaw in bitcoin. I bet a whole bunch of people are laughing their asses off. something we will probably see in the next couple of years

One of the main advantages of ASICs is that they prevent botnets from mining your coin. Also, specialized hardware prevents attackers from using general purpose hardware (e.g., by just renting a "few" EC2 instances). Only disadvantage in regard to ASICs is that the ride from GPU mining to ASICs is a little bit bumpy, but Bitcoin mostly already finished that ride.

Miners will go where profit is, and Satoshi knew this. Satoshi also predicted ASICs, so none of this is a surprise. You are just repeating the same nonsense as every copycoin holder.

can you explain the disadvantages of allowing asic mining?

Not everybody has ASICs, so it limits the number of people who can compete. In theory, this could create a centralisation effect. In practice, that seems to happen anyway due to mining pools.

You can always use P2Pool (http://whatisp2pool.com). Decentralised mining.

I'm not sure if this is a parody.

Regardless of intention, I see it as a kind of performance art project: it underlines the absurdity of the massproduction of innovationless altcoins. It speaks to how a successful cryptocurrency requires something more than just tweaking a few parameters and recompiling; it requires a skilled developer able to maintain the system and handle crises, it requires a network effect, it requires a meaningful purpose.

Yes, a "meaningful purpose" is clearly necessary:

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

Amusement is a purpose unfulfilled by most altcoins

dogecoin is amusing

Very amusing, such cryptocurrency, much means of exchange!

It's the tip of the new crypto-currency craze: trading crypto-currencies themselves as a currency. We're moving onto a higher order now, folks!

Anyway, if that works you can still make the PedoCoin become Real http://coingen.io/status.html haha

It is. It's the end of a long-running joke on #bitcoin-dev.

But it does actually work and apparently people are willing to pay for it weirdly enough. BlueMatt, you should have set your prices higher.

Surely this is useful though, despite others claims it is a parody?

Can this be used to create a distributed transaction system for some arbitrary application? E.g. create a massively multilayer game with its own underlying transaction safe economy.

I thought the block chain was useful in itself, forgetting about the currency implications. Its a good data structure. Cloning it seems mega useful for putting it to work elsewhere..

Pretty much all of the benefits of Bitcoin stem from the concept of blockchain, not from particular instance of it.

One has to keep this in mind when investing in Bitcoin. One doesn't invest in general future of cryptocurrencies, one simply invests in the blockchain that just happened to be first.

It is indeed a highly useful data structure. One can implement things such as verifiable online gambling (one where casino cannot cheat without being detected) with it. Basically it simply solves a byzantine generals problem.

The proof of work doesn't even need to be a hash. Primecoin searches for chains of prime numbers. As long as the work is easy to verify and hard to calculate with some sort of scaling it can be used. It would be nice to see things like Salesmancoin where the proof of work is partial solutions to traveling salesman problem. Or perhaps protein folding?

Is the block chain actually useable without miners though? I guess the game example is pretty neat because the clients can 'mine' behind the scenes but if a company wanted to do something like that would they need permanent miners to make it work?

"massively multilayer game"

Inception?

Every person on this planet should have her own currency.

This is a great segue for the "pump and dump" scheme. Essentially you can create your own coin and mine it with your buddies. Then create a mini exchange for the coin and target the older, less tech savvy people - who won't be able to tell the difference between Bitcoins and a more obfuscated virtual currency. Basically you'll accumulate the virtual coins for free and sell them off for a profit. Maybe I'm missing something but it feels like all the ingredients are present.

Ten confirmations in, my coin still isn't showing up. I guess the site's overwhelmed, but I wouldn't recommend others spend any money until the backlog's cleared.

The site (now) says: "Note that payment is currently processed semi-manually, and thus there may be significant lag between payment and build"

I was thinking about this the other day, that people will start making their own crypto currencies, trying to cash in on a new currency and have it work out like it did for the early adopters of BTC. These currencies will be very volatile, but all of them will become part of a new Forex landscape. If you think there's a lot of speculators now working with bitcoin, wait until people start trying to play arbitrage with different crypto currencies. The new Wild West...

This has actually been going on for a while. Check out www.cryptsy.com -- I think there are already over 50 crypto currencies being traded there, with more being added regularly. People are making tons of money on the initial pumps and dumps of all of them.

There's a sucker born every minute, but how far can the pyramid go? Is it a snake eating its own tail? Make a bunch, try to leverage that up a level? The losers will eventually be zeroed out.

The market capitalization of altcoins is being tracked here:

http://coinmarketcap.com/

I believe this emphatically proves the point that cryptocurrencies are not at all different from Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

I was going to do this too[https://twitter.com/xyzgra/status/408947104455745536]. Oh well. Congrats.

I just created Hackernews Coin. They give you a website link that you need to refresh. Now, I need to wait...

It's awesome how the crypto-currency ecosystem becomes harder and harder to kill with hacks like this.

Actually, I'd say that developments like this help to kill the crypto-currency ecosystem.

But nobody (outside of maybe China) seems that inclined to hinder it... Trolls love to see the volatility because the fall is so fiery and believers are deluded, so whatever. The trickle of fresh meat for the slaughter is the glory. Watching another anti-statist indoctrinated into a believer only to get flounced - priceless for anyone else who was inb4!

Funny idea, but why trust these binaries not to mine for the author?

BlueMatt runs some of the build testing for the real daemon, so they're trustworthy as hell.

Because you can download the source, too, if paying a bit more.

My guess is, in long term bitcoin price will fall. Eventually multiple services will add other currencies next to bitcoin.

This is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. I can't even begin to explain...

Where's the API ?

You might be able to use dev tools to generate the curl request.

Its a post request to coingen.io/create.json with the arguments: coinname, abrev, customload, source, hidden, pow, blockrate, initvalue, halfrate, port and icon (the 256x256 icon file).

hackernewscoin?

I knew it was just a matter of time before someone made this. Nice!

Maybe a good feature would be to generate an html homepage for the coin, as well as a forum post for the alt coins section in Bitcointalk. Also a coin icon generator.

Lastly, perhaps charge the fee after the person can see it's all there.

Also automatically setup the github or bitbucket repo, create a subreddit and you could also throw in an exchange with the new homepage.

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