KuCoin Academy 5| Are Altcoins Hidden Gems Or Scams？

Published in

kucoinexchange

3 min readAug 13, 2020

New to crypto? Don’t worry. Keep up with KuCoin and soon you will become a crypto expert!

We are now launching the KuCoin Academy program, covering topics from crypto basics to trading knowledge. After learning each lesson, you will be able to complete a quiz to earn reward points!

This is the 5th lesson we prepared for you! Today’s topic is Altcoins!

Contents:

* What Is An Altcoin?

* Do Altcoins Have Investment Merit?

* Altcoin Types

* Examples of Altcoins

1. What Is An Altcoin?

Altcoin is jargon in the blockchain industry. Early on in blockchain’s development, altcoin was used as a general term for any alternative to Bitcoin. In other words, all cryptocurrencies but Bitcoin are altcoins. But now, the definition of altcoins has begun to blur. Different people have different ideas about what altcoins are.

2. Do Altcoins Have Investment Merit?

Many altcoins have tried to improve on Bitcoin’s limitations and introduced innovative features. So, many altcoins have a certain value.

3. Altcoin Types

As altcoins developed, different types have appeared. Most altcoins use a mining mechanism, like LTC, but some altcoins don’t use it, like EOS. Some altcoins also strengthen privacy protection for cryptocurrency transactions, like XMR, and some have directly forked from the Bitcoin Network, like BCH.

4. Examples of Altcoins

Litecoin (LTC): Litecoin was launched in October of 2011 and was considered the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. Although it is fundamentally similar to Bitcoin in both code and function, there are also differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin. Litecoin shortens the time it takes to create blocks. LTC has a total supply of 84 million, which is 4x the supply of Bitcoin.

Many believe that LTC will be more suitable for daily transactions than Bitcoin due to its fast block production time and large number of coins. So, Litecoin has been able to stand out from the altcoin crowd.

Monero (XMR): Monero was created in April 2014. Monero introduces a privacy function, which makes the details of the transaction (like the identities of the sender and recipient and the amount of each transaction) anonymous by masking the addresses of the participants. Therefore it provides a more secure network for participants.

These privacy advantages promote mass adoption of Monero, but they also bring challenges. Monero’s non-traceability and privacy features make it possible to use for disreputable purposes and at questionable marketplaces, including those like drugs and gambling.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH): Bitcoin Cash or BCH, as a fork of BTC, it has a larger block (a Bitcoin block limit is 1 MB, but a BCH block is 32 MB). Therefore, BCH can process more transactions per second, which solves the BTC scalability problem.

However, BCH also has some potential problems. Compared with the Bitcoin Network, its security may be compromised. So, Bitcoin is still the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, and the cryptocurrency with the largest market capitalization. BCH’s liquidity and use case are lower than Bitcoin.

EOS.IO (EOS): EOS is an operating system based on the blockchain. It hopes to build a strong infrastructure for decentralized applications (DApps). EOS tries to solve the problems of inherent problems of blockchain technology, such as low transaction speed, poor scalability, and low flexibility. Anyone can develop, host, and execute commercial-scale distributed applications on the EOS platform.

Although EOS has great potential, its grand vision is still just a dream, and whether it can achieve the expected results remains to be seen.

Finished the article? Here’s a quiz to test how much you have learned from this lesson. Answering all the questions correctly will earn you 100 points.

Join the KuCoin Official Group to be informed of the upcoming lessons.

Don’t have a KuCoin Account? Sign up here!

Reading our previous article here:

KuCoin Academy 5| Are Altcoins Hidden Gems Or Scams？

Written by KuCoin Academy