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I propose that the community here try to keep a list of altcoins. There are a few on the web, but none of them are comprehensive. I read some where that there are over 90 altcoins, but any list I have seen has never listed more than 50. I think this is the best list currently available. This one is pretty good too.

The first consideration is how the list will be organized. I see two possible ways that are useful:

  1. Organize by use and popularity
  2. Organize by type, relative to Bitcoin

Number one is straight forward and easy to tell. There would be categories such as Large, medium, small, new and dead.

Number two is a little more in depth and I honestly don't have the knowledge about altcoins to even suggest categories, except that I understand Ripple is centrally controlled, where bitcoin is not, so that can be a category, and that Litecoin is "Script" not "SHA-256".

I see no reason, of course, to not make a hybrid of each organization style. I see no reason to not have categories of both, or even have the same list twice, but organized differently.

If we make the list, I suggest that we link to questions tagged for that coin, if they exist. We should also link to any official sites, if they exist. Wikipedia articles might be a good idea, again, if they exist.

Organization within categories can go any number of ways, but alphabetized is easiest and never changes and also avoids arguments.

So here is an example format:

Large

Litecoin (Tagged Questions) (Official site) (Wikipedia)
Namecoin (Tagged Questions) (Official site) (Wikipedia)

Centralized

Ripple (Tagged Questions) (Official site) (Wikipedia)

Now there's only one question left: Should this be on meta or the main site? I'm in favor of the main site simply because it will get more exposure. Community wiki avoids the rep problem and invites new users to add new coins we don't know about.

Any takers to get us started?

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  • Ripple started out centralized but has made their server software open-source by now. While it is still less decentralized than most altcoins, I don't think that it really fits under a "centralized" caption.
    – Murch Mod
    Mar 13, 2014 at 0:21
  • I don't think it would be reasonable to keep an accurate list of altcoins, as there are many forks with the only difference being popularity of the coin. Maybe categories and along with it simple explanations and an example?
    – John T
    Mar 13, 2014 at 21:04

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Although it would be possible to create such an altcoin list here on Bitcoin.SE, I think that it would be destined to become merely another incomplete list of some altcoins. Further, I think that it wouldn't serve the purpose for which it was created:

  • For people who come to ask, "I heard about FooCoin, where can I find more information about it?" such a list probably wouldn't help because they wouldn't have found the list anyway.

  • For people who ask questions like What are some of the different takes on proof of work, such a list could help answer the question but the answers would consist of little more than a link to the page with the info.

A proper wiki (eg. https://bitcoin.it) is probably a better place because Mediawiki has actual support for tables, with sorting and filtering. The current List of alternative cryptocurrencies page seems rather incomplete and out of date, and also doesn't use the Mediawiki table features. Certainly room for improvement there.

The current most canonical list appears to be this forum thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 which as we all know is a terrible place to keep information. (Who would ever read all 67 pages of that thread?)

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I saw a circular tree that showed all altcoins based on what were forked ("branched") from. You could mouse over each node to see the coin's parameters too, found it:

http://www.mapofcoins.com/

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  • Absolutely amazing resource. If only the descriptions gave some sort of indication to how healthy the economy for a particular coin is.
    – frеdsbend
    Mar 21, 2014 at 0:36
  • @fredsbend is it the right answer
    – CQM
    Mar 21, 2014 at 3:02
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Since there is no way to create a table on Stackexchange I am afraid, that it would not be feasible to put a lot of different columns in it and keep it readable. We would have to select the most important information.

It might work as a community wiki question on the main site, however, it would need quite a bit of work to get it started and then also maintenance to keep it useful.

At least to start out, we should keep it constrained to altcoins that have questions tagged on this page as that should make it much more manageable.

I am not sure whether the wikipedia pages are really the most important information for crypto currencies. I'd propose to format in such a way:

SHA-256d based

Scrypt based

Other Hashing Algorithm

  • Quarkcoin – – Official Site – Multiple hashing algorithm
  • Maxcoin – – maxcoin.co.uk – Keccak (SHA-3)
  • Primecoin...
  • Datacoin...

Other cryptocurrencies

No clue

Solidcoin, yacoin, zerocoin, vertcoin, Freicoin

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  • Is there a single tag where this would work in a tag wiki?
    – Tim Post
    Mar 13, 2014 at 5:55
  • We have an "altcoin"-tag that would lend itself to it. But aren't tag-wikis pretty much invisible unless you specifically search for them?
    – Murch Mod
    Mar 13, 2014 at 14:33
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coinmarketcap has a frequently updated list of at the time of posting 138 coins, sortable by various factors

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  • This is nice, but does not have the technical details about the coin, such as scrypt or SHA framework
    – frеdsbend
    Mar 25, 2014 at 19:54

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