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Comparison of cryptocurrencies
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The cryptocurrency market is explosive which currently serves hundreds of currencies. Almost all of them are obvious scams—including many which purport to have a large market cap. This article aims to list only the most relevant cryptocurrencies in terms of novel technological advancements or strong engineering teams, or due to widespread awareness thereof. Direct, low-level scams should not be listed here.
| Cryptocurrency | Exchange symbol | Launched | Anonymity | Notes | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16px Bitcoin | BTC | 2009-01-03 | Low | First blockchain. | bitcoin.org |
| 16px Bitcoin Cash | BCH | 2017-08-01 | Low | An altcoin based on Bitcoin's blockchain with replay protection and an increased block size limit of 8MB. An unusual emergency difficulty adjustment algorithm causes significant periods of hyperinflation. | bitcoincash.org |
| 16px Namecoin | NMC | 2011-04-18 | Low | First cryptocurrency that implemented Satoshi's BitDNS idea. Essentially the first real altcoin. Still under active development. First merged-mined altcoin. | namecoin.info |
| 16px Dash | DASH | 2014-01-18 | Low | Introduced the X11 algorithm, which is just a composite function of multiple hashing algorithms. Had a significant failure mode in the beginning which equated to a majority premine by a small number of Amazon EC2 customers. This means their Master Node algorithm has been in a failure mode from the beginning. | dash.orh |
| 16px Ethereum | ETH | 2015-08-07 | Low | Majority premine sale. Source of the ICO bubble. Multiple client implementations which fail against each other in terms of consensus errors regularly. Requires multiple months of time to sync to eth blockchain. Contract-building tools interpret input incompatibly. | ethereum.org |
| 16px Ethereum Classic | ETC | 2016-07-24 | Low | An altcoin of Ethereum which split from ETH's blockchain when the DAO was hardforked to refund the Ethereum Foundation's members' money, including to Roger Ver. | ethereumclassic.org |
| 16px Litecoin | LTC | 2011-10-07 | Low | Originally meant to be a CPU-friendly "silver" to Bitcoin's "gold", the early SCRYPT parameters, it was discovered later, led directly to GPU, and then ASIC-mining almost from the start. | litecoin.org |
| 16px Monero | XMR | 2014-04-18 | Medium | The most successful implementation derived from the Cryptonote codedrop. Uses Ring Confidential Transactions. | getmonero.org |
| 16px Zcash | ZEC | 2016-10-28 | Medium | First cryptocurrency that implemented the zerocash protocol. Large "Founder's Reward" which is paid out over the first few years of mining. | z.cash |
| 16px Zcoin | XZC | 2016-09-28 | Medium | First cryptocurrency that implemented the zerocoin protocol which also makes it the first useful Zero-knowledge proof based anonymous cryptocurrency. First that implements Merkle Tree Proof of Work (MTP). | zcoin.io |
Sources
See also
- Blockchain
- Comparison of mining pools
- Comparison of cryptographic hash functions
- Comparison of exchanges
- Comparison of payment systems
| Cryptocurrency | Max supply | Algorithm | Proof Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16px Bitcoin | ~21,000,000 | SHA256 | PoW |
| 16px Bitcoin Cash | ~21,000,000 | SHA256 | PoW |
| 16px Namecoin | ~21,000,000 | SHA256 Merged(Bitcoin) | PoW |
| 16px Dash | 22,000,000 | X11 | PoW/PoS |
| 16px Ethereum | Infinite | Ethash | PoW |
| 16px Ethereum Classic | Infinite | Ethash | PoW |
| 16px Litecoin | ~84,000,000 | Scrypt | PoW |
| 16px Monero | Not Applicable | CryptoNight | PoW |
| 16px Zcash | ~21,000,000 | Equihash | PoW |
| 16px Zcoin | ~21,000,000 | Lyra2RE | PoW |
