Thanks to Bitcoin, blockchain technology has attracted worldwide attention. Like any new technology, it has its limitations. Many variations of Bitcoin were created to address a particular limitation of Bitcoin. Here, we mention a few of them:
- Bitcoin Cash: This is a hard fork of the Bitcoin chain that was created because a group of Bitcoin core developers wanted to use a different way of addressing the scalability issue.
- Litecoin: This is almost identical to Bitcoin except that the time for adding a new block was reduced from 10 minutes to 2 minutes.
- Zcash: This is based on Bitcoin but offers total payment confidentiality.
- Monero and Zcash: Both altcoins address the privacy issue by making transaction history untraceable, but they implement two different solutions.
- Dash: This mainly improves user-friendliness. For example, transactions are made untraceable and a user does not have to wait for several additional new blocks to be added before considering a transaction to be committed to the chain.
- Namecoin: This extends the use case of Bitcoin, which is for trading BTCs only, to providing domain name services.
- Peercoin: This altcoin addresses the deficiencies of PoW, which is environmentally unfriendly and is low in throughput. Instead, it adopts proof of stake for achieving consensus. Based on this rule, a miner validates block transactions according to how many coins a miner holds. In other words, the mining power of a miner is in proportion to the number of peercoins owned.
- Primecoin: A primecoin miner competes to be the first to find the next biggest prime number.